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MANHANDLED 


BY 

ARTHUR STRINGER 

AND 

RUSSELL HOLMAN 


ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES 
FROM THE PHOTOPLAY 
A PARAMOUNT PICTURE 

STARRING GLORIA SWANSON 


ra 



GROSSET & DUNLAP 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 


Made in the United States of Ameriafe 












Copyright, 1924 

By The Bobbs-Merrill Company 




W Q 

s. 


•• 


Printed in the United States of America 


AUG ig 


1324 


©C1A800500 


Vic 


/ 


TO 


I 

SIDNEY R. KENT 


Without whom Manhandled would not 
and could not have been written 


MANHANDLED 


CHAPTER I 

I F YOU are a patron of vaudeville, and if you 
have a good memory and a touch of sentiment 
in your make-up, you will probably recall McGuire 
and McGuire. 

Not that their standing in the profession would 
ever keep them fresh in your mind. For McGuire 
and McGuire \vere not of the elite of the two-a-day 
that enjoys the pick of the dressing-rooms, lawsuits 
with managers, musical-comedy offers and incomes 
from phonograph record’s. Their names seldom 
flashed forth in electricity above theater marquises. 
They never occupied the enviable “next-to-closing” 
position on the bill of the Palace on Broadway, or, 
in fact, the Palace anywhere. 

If you fail to recollect the name, perhaps you may 
remember their act, A Quiet Evening at Home. 

The curtain rolled aloft to disclose a tenement- 
house room such as mortal eye never rested on be¬ 
fore. It combined in riotous disarray the features 
of living-room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. A can- 
i 


2 


MANHANDLED 


ary sang lustily in a battered cage suspended on the 
clothes-line. The hooks studding the open door of 
the one closet held pans, wearing apparel and a huge 
advertising calendar. With a loud preliminary 
clatter outside the door, Frank McGuire entered. 
His red good-natured face, surmounted by the even 
redder and, in his last few years, rapidly thinning 
hair, could hardly be seen through the load of bun¬ 
dles of all sizes and shapes that he was heroically 
striving to cariy. Stumbling over the door-sill, he 
suddenly dropped these bundles, dropped them with 
a deafening crash, abetted by the orchestra’s cym¬ 
bals. And the audience roared both at his misfor¬ 
tune and the comical chagrin that suffused his face. 

Then, planted amid his tom and scattered burden, 
McGuire began roaring for “Babe! Babe!” No 
one appearing, he sighed prodigiously, donned a 
dirty apron, and, first clearing the crude kitchen 
table of a score of motley objects with a majestic 
sweep of his arm, proceeded to prepare the evening 
meal. Lifting the lid of the upright piano, which 
looked as if it had survived with difficulty a hard 
campaign in the front lines in France to become a 
combined music- and ice-box, he produced food from 
the instrument’s innards. His rapid and deft ac¬ 
tions were a series of tricks. The audience fol¬ 
lowed him with fascinated delight. 


MANHANDLED 


3 


At the height of his clowning, the door burst open 
anew, and a puffing, perspiring, and, during the final 
seasons of the act, rather corpulent and doggedly 
blonde woman came bustling in. This was the miss¬ 
ing “Babe,” the other half of McGuire and Mc¬ 
Guire. Her first lines—racy, in the New York 
patois of the lower strata, and delivered in a rich, 
pleasingly hoarse contralto—were a bristling defense 
of her lateness. No, she didn't get the job. Walked 
her feet off, she had, to every department store in 
New York. And in the last one that fresh snip of 
a manager— 

McGuire thereupon accused her of flirting. They 
bickered, they pleaded with each other ridiculously, 
they exploded with hilarious fun, they almost came 
to blows. McGuire dumped a pair of shoes out of 
a pan, produced a gas-stove miraculously and bent 
his energies upon frying an egg. Their quarrel 
broke out afresh, gained violence while the top gal¬ 
leries screamed and whistled with delight. “Babe” 
shied one of the discarded shoes at her mate. He 
retorted with the still liquid egg. They raced 
around the room. The folding-bed came hurtling 
from the wall and struck the stage with a resound¬ 
ing whack and an avalanche of blankets, pillows and 
a wildly shrilling alarm clock. The gas stove was 
catapulted from its moorings. McGuire leaped on 


4 


MANHANDLED 


top of the hollow piano, ruining its balance and 
sending it crashing to the floor. Groping wildly to 
break his fall, he seized the portieres and stripped 
them from their rings in his mad career, landing on 
the floor in the midst of them, while “Babe,” sent 
spinning backward, stumbled into the half-filled tin 
bathtub and there, half inundated, sank disheveled 
and breathless to rest 

Thus, the climax of the act achieved, McGuire 
as a parting flash of inspiration sprang up, seized 
a broom, and, using the handle as a billiard cue, sent 
the half-loaf of bread that was the sole remnant of 
the supper remaining on the table spinning into the 
involuntary bather’s lap. Turning quickly to the 
denuded portiere-rod, he nonchalantly recorded the 
shot by sharply flicking one of the brass portiere 
rings with his improvised cue, and, striking a pose, 
faced the audience with a broad grin. 

And the curtain came briskly down in the face of 
the sea of solid laughter and applause. 

Such was A Quiet Evening at Home as delineated 
by McGuire and McGuire in their prime upon the 
chief vaudeville circuits of America, not to speak of 
three sojourns to England, France and Germany 
and a memorable trek to Australia. It stood, as¬ 
suredly, no great contribution to the art of the stage. 
Frankly slapstick it was, and, in spots, crassly vul- 


MANHANDLED 


5 


gar. And McGuire and McGuire would have been 
the first to deny that it was anything else. Yet, to 
the discerning eye and to the heart that is sensitively 
attuned to the human tragi-comedy, it was some¬ 
thing else. 

For into this melange of noise and nonsense that 
furnished them with their livelihood, Mr. and Mrs. 
Frank McGuire, perhaps quite unconsciously, in¬ 
jected a touch of their own personality. And this 
gift of personality (for to an amazing degree the 
McGuires even before their marriage had much in 
common and had later been welded into one circle 
of interest and action by their wedding-ring) set 
them just a little apart from the ordinary vaude- 
villian. 

A Quiet Evening at Home, with all its crudity, 
with all its formlessness and lack of attempt at any¬ 
thing beyond the production of cheap laughter, had 
a note of the wistful, of the groping, about it. You 
liked “Babe” and her rough and husky consort. 
Here, you somehow felt, were a lowly couple fight¬ 
ing the age-old battle of New York, trying amid 
ridiculous surroundings and fearful handicaps to 
achieve a living in the great stern city. The bundles 
that McGuire came staggering in under were almost 
a symbol. When his world came crashing down 
upon his broad shoulders, and, rising amid the 


6 


MANHANDLED 


wreck, he triumphantly clicked the portiere ring, it 
was something akin to the happy ending of an 
allegory. 

Yes, there was a note of the wistful and upward- 
climbing and lovable about the elder McGuires even 
in their public appearances. If you recall their act, 
you probably remember feeling that too. 

It was in the early years of A Quiet Evening at 
Home that, in the midst of summer and a long 
stretch of one-night stands, bad hotels and almost 
insufferable heat in the Middle West, Frank Mc¬ 
Guire noticed his partner becoming steadily less and 
less spontaneous and more and more labored in the 
spirited gyrations about the stage which her role 
demanded, though she gamely protested that she 
could go on. 

And so, wiring their agency that they were “lay¬ 
ing off” for a few weeks, they picked out the coolest 
near-by town along the Mississippi containing the 
best hospital and hotel that they could afford 
There another McGuire came into the world—a girl 
baby with the velvety white skin and violet eyes of 
her mother and the pertly turned-up and inquisi¬ 
tively Celtic nose of her father. They christened 
her Theresa, after Nora McGuire’s mother. But 
from the first she was known as Tess. 

Frank McGuire looked at the little white miracle, 


MANHANDLED 


7 

for the first time. He looked at her through misty 
eyes, knowing the ordeal of Nora, who had left her 
job almost too late for her health, had been a cruel 
one. Then he exclaimed, “Some little trouper she’ll 
be.” 

And Nora answered weakly, but with a flash of 
her own Irish self, “That she will not.” 

Frank, to her surprise and delight, understood 
and was in instant sympathy with the thought she 
had warmed half fearfully within her bosom, from 
the time she first knew there was to be a baby. 

“Two troupers in this family is enough, eh, old 
girl?” he asked, with smiling comprehension, ven¬ 
turing almost reverently to pat his wife’s wan cheek. 
“We’ll make a blooming lady of her, eh ?” 

The wistfulness, the groping of the McGuires, 
was seeking and hoping to have found, at last, an 
outlet. 

By the time they were ready to start on the road 
again, they had made their plans about Tess. Nora 
McGuire had an unmarried sister in a country town 
in Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, some ten 
miles from New London. Nora’s family, in fact, 
had originated in Marysville, and there was senti¬ 
ment as well as expediency in the plan she framed 
for her daughter, whose red and puckered features 
were fast achieving recognizably human contours, 


8 


MANHANDLED 


just as the stout little body was steadily gaining 
even more than the requisite eight ounces a week. 

“You’ve met Kitty, Frank,” she urged her hus¬ 
band. “Remember, she was the only one of my 
folks who had enough pep and interest to come to 
New York and see us spliced. Kitty’s a crab in 
many respects, but her heart is O. K. She’s all of 
ten years older than me, and, oh, much more refined. 
Had a normal school education and taught school 
for years until, as she says, the kids got on her 
nerves. So she had to quit. She got all of my 
folk’s money when they died, including what I 
would have copped if I hadn’t got in wrong by 
running away and marrying a rotten vaudeville 
actor.” Taking the sting out of these last words by 
the typical Noraesque device of seizing a fistful of 
her husband’s brickish hair, jerking his head back, 
and kissing him upon the lips. 

“Kitty’s got enough to keep her comfortable,” 
she went on. “She is one of the big bugs in Marys¬ 
ville, as I get it. My idea is to write her and get 
her to take the baby, on condition we ship her money 
at definite times for the kid’s board and keep. It’s 
going to be tough parting with the little varmint, 
but you and I have got to stay on the job, of course, 
to beat the well-known wolf from the door. And 
we can’t go trapsing a month-old kid all over the 


MANHANDLED 


9 

country in this heat and with the rotten places we 
stop at.” 

“Besides,” Frank McGuire added, with a whim¬ 
sical grin upon his lined and tired and middle-aged 
face, “we don’t want her trouping, even when she’s 
too young to know what it’s all about. I always 
said to myself, if I had a kid, specially a girl kid, I 
wouldn’t want her on the stage when she grew up. 
I’d want her to stay away from the show business 
and Broadway as far as she could get. The show 
business has been pretty good for us, Nora, and we 
aren’t such bums either. But there’s no getting 
away from it—it takes something out of you. It’s 
like New York. If you want to get by, you’ve got 
to give up something, some of the freshness and re¬ 
finement that you ought to be able to keep. I want 
my little kid to grow up and have everything that 
you and I haven’t been able to get for ourselves. I 
want her to have the best education we can buy her. 
I want her to grow up pretty and innocent, and 
marry some decent young guy who’ll love her. And 
I only hope to God I live long enough to see all that 
happen.” 

And if any of the stage acquaintances of McGuire 
and McGuire could have glimpsed the bright, almost 
crusader smiles upon the faces of the new mother 
and father and the light in their, respectively, very 


IO 


MANHANDLED 


blue and very violet eyes, they would have been 
more convinced than ever that there was “somethin' 
different about them two McGuires.” 

“Then it’s a go that I write Kitty?” Nora finally 
asked. 

“It’s a go.” 

The hospital authorities recommended a compe¬ 
tent family to assume temporary custody of the very 
youthful Miss Theresa McGuire while her parents 
invaded the sweltering trans-Mississippi hamlets for 
another month in belated fulfilment of their theatri¬ 
cal contract. At the end of that time, the eager 
parents bent back upon their trail, accumulated the 
big-eyed and amazingly healthy Tess, now quite 
definitely resembling her mother, and an enormous 
juvenile wardrobe purchased in every town in which 
they had played, squandered a frightful sum for a 
compartment in an east-bound train, and a week 
later were being pulled by two lazy gray horses up 
shady Main Street, Maiysville, in a dusty bus to¬ 
ward the residence of Miss Katherine McNair on 
the outer edge of town. Tess very kindly obliged 
by sleeping peacefully, a precious* soft white bundle 
of blanket, in her proud mother's arms. 

The McNair homestead, a rambling house of 
medium size in an attractive September setting of 


MANHANDLED 


il 


lawn and garden, appealed to Frank McGuire, who 
had not seen it since the day, nearly six years before, 
when he had triumphantly and somewhat arrogantly 
escorted Nora McNair from under her irate 
mother’s nose out of the door to New York and 
wedlock. The homestead appealed to him much 
more, in fact, than did its present owner. For 
Katherine McNair, looming up grimly behind the 
pale wisp of a maid-servant who opened the door 
to the expected visitors, was a woman of forty-five 
or thereabouts, inclined to those physical propor¬ 
tions which Marysville designated as “skinny.” A 
second glance, however, gave promise of more good 
nature than one would associate with her appear¬ 
ance. Aside from their reddishly sandy hair, there 
was little of likeness between Katherine and Nora. 
Residence amid' the rocky rigid soil and customs of 
New England seemed on the surface effectually to 
have stifled what there might originally have been of 
Celtic warmth and gaiety within the angular frame 
of Katherine, and her sober face, her thin-pressed 
lips, and her gray eyes that now peered rather 
coldly from behind the shiny gold-rimmed nose- 
glasses seemed tokens of the fact that she had never 
quite reconciled herself to the disconcerting reality 
of an only sister being an active member of a par- 


12 


MANHANDLED 


ticularly low order of the theatrical profession. 
And married to an actor! And the mother of an 
actor’s offspring! 

Nevertheless, -Miss McNair could smile, and could 
claim her own secret virtues, as her sister and 
Marysville would attest. She was honest, she was 
generous when she esteemed the cause deserving. 
Her high sense of duty and a genuine, though, in 
her mature years, carefully concealed love for Nora 
had impelled her at the time of her sister’s wedding 
to disregard her outraged sensibilities and her own 
father and mother and, journeying to New York, to 
be the sole McNair attendant of the bride at the 
ceremony. The same sense of duty and responsi¬ 
bility toward Nora was now leading her to assume 
the guardianship of Nora’s baby. 

She responded indulgently to Nora’s greeting, 
consisting of a lusty hug and a resounding smack 
upon Katherine’s severe lips, which had never held 
any terrors for Nora. Turning from Nora’s ex¬ 
uberance to Frank, Katherine shook hands with him 
and said, “How do you do, Frank?” with precision. 
Then, drawing the fleecy blanket in Nora’s arms 
somewhat gingerly away from the pink little face 
that it partly concealed, she surveyed the heiress of 
the McGuires with an appraising eye. 

“She is pretty, and she looks quite healthy,” Miss 


MANHANDLED 


i3 

McNair admitted, and thereupon invited‘her visitors 
to take chairs and remove their wraps. 

Such was Tess McGuire's introduction to Marys¬ 
ville, where, save for certain intervals, she spent the 
first twenty years of her life. 

For five years, McGuire and McGuire faithfully 
remitted a generous portion of the receipts of A 
Quiet Evening at Home to Marysville, making a 
rather pathetic little ceremony of it every Saturday 
night when their check arrived from the booking 
office. At intervals of about six months, they man¬ 
aged to snatch time for a flying visit to their pride 
and joy, who never failed to astound them with the 
physical and mental progress she was making. 

“She is such a perfect darling—and so pretty," 
the ecstatic Nora would breathe. 

“She will be a witch among the lads," exulted the 
other part of McGuire and McGuire, half because 
he believed it and half for the pleasure of seeing his 
wife’s sister bristle inwardly and glance at him so 
cloudily. 

In the autumn that Tess was five, a railroad 
bridge in the midst of a Texas wilderness of mes- 
quit and alkali became so strained and weakened 
by the onslaughts of the rain-swollen river roaring 
beneath it, that it suddenly gave up the fight in the 
middle of the night under the additional weight of 


14 


MANHANDLED 


a solid train of Pullmans. The thundering of the 
train ended abruptly to the sharp cracking of heavy 
wood, shrieks of twisted steel and human beings, 
prolonged hissing of steam as if from a giant calli¬ 
ope, colossal splashes as cars and locomotive plunged 
down into the muddy waters and finally, from the 
two rear coaches that miraculously remained upon 
the rails, high-leaping flames. 

Two days later when the “Big Hook,” a derrick 
mounted on wheels and brought from an impossible 
distance, had lifted the first of the shapeless cars 
from the bottom of the river, and workmen with 
acetyline torches had burned an opening through 
its steel side, the first bodies recovered were those of 
a man and a woman locked in each other’s arms and, 
quite characteristically, smiling in death. 

Thus fate rang down the final curtain on McGuire 
and McGuire and A Quiet Evening at Home. 


CHAPTER II 


T HE house stood on elevated ground about 
three hundred yards in from the shore of the 
sound. Up to the level of the second floor it was 
built of native field-stone garnered on the spot when 
the cellar was dug and blasted. The third floor and 
the roof were of unpainted! shingle, weather-beaten 
and streaked from the sun and from the storms that 
beat in from Long Island Sound. The southeast 
comer of the house swelled into a conical cupola 
that was not unlike the blockhouses by means of 
which the earliest settlers of that region used to 
defend themselves against the marauding Indian. 
A low wide veranda without a railing ran along the 
spacious front and around one side. On the other 
side was the slightly dilapidated porte-cochere. 

Here and there gray-black protuberances of the 
ledge of granite-rock running just under the surface 
of the broad lawn bulged up above the rich green of 
the grass. Magnolia, forsythia, rambler-rose and 
other shrubbery bloomed with man-arranged sym¬ 
metry among the larger fruit-trees and evergreens, 
15 


i6 


MANHANDLED 


so that in nearly all seasons the McNair homestead 
could boast of a colorful settling. 

The front of the lawn sloped to a private road. 
Between this road and the blue waters of the sound 
stretched the estate of John P. Harlan, retired New 
York banker and Marysville's rich man. Save for 
the line of tall Lombardy poplars marking Mr. Har¬ 
lan's western boundary there was an unobstructed 
view of the shore from the McNair piazza. 

It was a very comfortable house, almost an ideal 
environment for a lively growing girl. 

On a sunny July morning, a youth with wet blond 
hair plastered sleek against his well-shaped head, 
with an attractive sun-bronzed face and equally 
bronzed and stalwart arms and legs revealed gener¬ 
ously by the tight and abbreviated black bathing-suit 
he wore, poised momentarily at the base of the Har¬ 
lan diving-board. He rose gracefully on his toes, 
swung both arms limberly aloft above his head, 
lowered them, and with long springy strides swung 
out to the tip of the pliant board jutting over the 
sun-sparkling water. There, balancing an instant 
and bouncing his hundred and sixty pounds of solid 
flesh upon the pliant wood, he launched himself 
through the air in a beautiful parabola and, slanting 
down like a swiftly-driven arrow, clove the water 
with the precision of a knife. Fifteen yards out 


MANHANDLED 


17 


into the sound, his head bobbed to the surface again. 
He shook the water from his eyes with a quick, roll¬ 
ing motion, like a dog’s. Smiling and' treading 
water, he faced the board again. 

“How’s that, Skipper?” he called. 

The girl in the light blue bathing-suit, faded by 
the sun until it was almost colorless, from the 
cement pier upon which the diving-board rested, 
answered gravely, “Not bad, Todd.” 

She had been standing there observing his every 
movement. She did so with the calculating eye of 
a connoisseur. 

“Well, go ahead then—do better. I’m waiting, 
Skipper.” 

She walked to the base of the board, posed her 
wiry little body precisely as Todd had done, swung 
her thin brown arms aloft and, striding out to the 
end of the board, embarked and achieved exactly the 
same rapier entrance into the water as he had, com¬ 
ing to the air again not two feet from his broad 
shoulders. 

“You’re there, Skipper,” Todd commented and, 
porpoising briefly, they swam easily to the base of 
the ladder leading up to the pier, the girl cleaving 
the water cleanly with a miniature imitation of his 
powerful stroke. 

Tess McGuire had been ten years old a whole 


i8 


MANHANDLED 


week now. Like most of the successful friendships 
in the world, her comradeship with Todd Harlan 
was based on a mutual interest in the same field of 
endeavor. Todd was a sophomore at Princeton and 
intended to be the intercollegiate champion fancy- 
diver that fall. Tess would rather swim than eat, 
and, moreover, had frequently proved it to the dis¬ 
comfiture of the strict prandial regime that obtained 
in the McNair household. But then, that was only 
one of the many annoying things that the, in many 
ways, incomprehensible Tess did to her Aunt Kath¬ 
erine, with the best intentions in the world. 

The latter could not understand, in the first place, 
why Tess would not content herself with swimming 
at her own, or rather, her aunt’s dock, which was 
quite safe, since it rose only some two feet above the 
water at high tide and looked down upon large 
jagged rocks that made diving impracticable. Two 
months previous, Tess had invaded the Harlan 
grounds, as she frequently did, and was looking out 
so wistfully at the long carpeted diving-plank hover¬ 
ing so invitingly over the cool water beneath that 
John P. Harlan, coming upon her as he strolled 
about his grounds, and already her friend of several 
years’ standing, smilingly bestowed upon her an 
invitation to swim there if she liked. 

‘Tve seen you in the water, you little fish, and I 


MANHANDLED 


19 


don’t think you’ll break your neck!” He patted her 
on her healthy young cheek, ‘‘I suppose, though, 
your aunt will want to break mine/’ 

In June, Todd, who was Harlan’s nephew and 
made his home with him, 'returned from Princeton 
for the summer. On the day after his arrival, dash¬ 
ing down from the house for a dip, he had come 
upon this amazing girl, tall for her age, brown as an 
Indian, diving from this really rather dangerous 
height, diving with the grave nonchalance of a vet¬ 
eran and swimming like an eel. Todd Harlan was 
at the age where a young man classifies kids as 
nuisances and obliterates them from his existence. 
But Tess was different. She was the most amazing 
kid he had ever seen. Nevertheless, he took little 
interest in her until she fell into the habit of noting 
the hours when he did his swimming, which were 
numerous, for his one passion that summer of his 
life was to perfect himself as a diver. And Tess 
made it a point to be on the pier at the same time 
and imitate every movement essayed by Todd. 

Swan, jack-knife, sailor’s, somersault, backward 
somersault—she could do them all. The more diffi¬ 
cult ones a little awkwardly, of course, but still very 
creditable performances. Not only was she far in 
advance of any other swimmer of her age of either 
sex, but she was much more proficient than the bulk 


20 


MANHANDLED 


of Todd's own friends who dived and frolicked with 
him at the Harlan pier, which was the nautical 
rendezvous of the younger, richer set of Marysville. 

And so, finally, Todd began showing Tess things 
about diving, and gradually she became his protegee. 
They were each other’s friends and severest critics. 
Tess was accepted also as a friend of Todd’s friends, 
who, though they bantered him about her good- 
naturedly, were unanimous in acclaiming his pupil 
as the diving prodigy of Long Island Sound. And 1 
though Aunt Katherine protested vigorously at this 
continual and preposterous risking of her ward’s 
small neck, she could do very little about it, and 
fortunately possessed the good sense to realize, from 
observation, that the water was one place, at least, 
where Tess was quite able to take care of herself. 

Tess was in more ways than one an enigma to 
the spinster Miss McNair. At ten the girl had the 
flat supple body of a boy and could do things with 
it that few boys could do. She could scale a tree 
with the agility and fearlessness of a squirrel. She 
could sail the Harlan small-boat with hardly a word 
of advice from Todd, sprawled along the gunwale. 
In summer—beginning with her eighth summer at 
least—she practically lived in her bathing suit, and 
the previous winter, disdaining the sled-skates which 


MANHANDLED 


21 


Aunt Katherine had reluctantly bought for her, she 
mastered regular man-shaped “hockies.” 

The mind of Tess was no less active and resilient 
than her body. At the Marysville school, which she 
had been attending for four years, she mastered 
with ridiculous ease the studies which she liked and 
calmly ignored the others. She already exhibited a 
distinct and authentic talent for drawing, particu¬ 
larly crude caricature, and a disconcerting flair for 
mimicry. The austere Miss McNair, though recog¬ 
nizing that her niece was in many respects an un¬ 
usual child, had never flaunted the fact in public. 
Possessed of a precocious memory for ‘dines” and 
for elocution, Tess had never been used to beguile 
the good folks of Marysville when they called at 
the McNair home. Moreover, Katherine McNair 
did not cultivate this particular gift by putting upon 
the lips of the child the usual infantile bits of silly 
doggerel, but taught her selections from Steven¬ 
son’s Child's Garden of Verses and even more ad¬ 
vanced compositions. At the Christmas entertain¬ 
ment given by the Methodist Church of Marysville, 
Tess had been quite the sensation of the evening. 

To Katherine McNair there was something a 
little disturbing about all this. For she, like Mc¬ 
Guire and McGuire, had resolved that under no cir- 


22 


MANHANDLED 


cumstances. was there to be another professional 
actress in the McNair family. 

“What you and I ought to do, Skipper/’ Todd 
Harlan bantered, as, resting, they sat swinging their 
legs lazily over the side of the Harlan pier and 
luxuriated in the hot sun, “is to take our little act 
into vaudeville. Harlan and McGuire, the Dazzling 
Diving Demons, eh?” 

“My mother and father were on the stage,” said 
Tess simply. 

“Yes, I know,” Todd replied. He had been told 
the story of the orphaning of his little pal, and idly 
wondered how much she had learned of it. 

“My auntie would never let us go on the stage, 
Todd.” 

“Why, did she say so?” 

“She never said so right out, but I can tell from 
some things she’s told me. I think it would be very 
nice to go on the stage. With a big glass tank and 
everything.” Her expressive violet eyes, the eyes 
of Nora McGuire, were very bright. 

“I’m not going to stay in Marysville all my life, 
you know. Some day I’m going away. Way to 
New York, I guess.” She laughed quietly, a little 
confusedly. “But you won’t tell anybody, will you, 
Todd? I wouldn’t want auntie to know and feel 
bad.” 


MANHANDLED 


23. 


When it came time that September for Todd to 
go back to college, after announcing one afternoon 
to Tess that this was to be their final “workout” for 
a while, he added that he would like to buy her some¬ 
thing to remember him by. After a grave pucker¬ 
ing of her small forehead, she said that she would 
like a wrist-watch. In a few days the timepiece 
mounted on a dainty little plain circlet of gold, 
bought by the Princeton-speeding youth in New 
York, arrived. Though Aunt Katherine protested 
that she had never heard of anything quite so fool¬ 
ish, she made sure that Tess had fastened it securely 
around her strong little wrist. 

In September came also John P. Harlan's three 
small grandchildren, all about Tess’s age. Though 
none of the trio could swim, they made the Harlan 
pier their playground and launching-place for their 
toy boats. The Harlans, who were not used to non¬ 
amphibian visitors, offered no protest. Tess was 
the constant playmate of the two shrill-voiced girls 
and Tommy, the quiet, anemic-looking boy with his 
disfiguring spectacles. She felt rather sorry for 
Tommy; he was so pathetically unable to keep up 
with the rest in their rather boisterous play, and he 
tried so hard. 

One late afternoon all four were scampering about 
the pier playing tag when Tommy, who, as usual 


24 


MANHANDLED 


was “it,” suddenly stumbled against the base of the 
diving-board and shunted abruptly out into space 
and down into the gold-green twenty feet of sound 
The sister* who was nearest the pier-edge emitted a 
shrill cry at the splash. Tess, who was the farthest 
away, turned, took in the situation, and in a flash 
was overboard. A few sturdy strokes and she had 
the feebly struggling Tommy firmly by the collar 
and was tugging him lustily to shore. Attaining 
which, he began crying very loudly and ejecting salt 
water. Mr. and Mrs. Harlan, who had been loung¬ 
ing upon the piazza, had by this time joined the 
excited group of children. 

Mrs. Harlan, a stout, emotional lady, hugged 
Tess, soaked clothes and all, and gushed, “Oh, you 
dear child, whatever would we have done if you 
hadn’t been there? You deserve a Carnegie medal 
for this. I want to make you a nice present—I 
really do. Now, what would you like?” 

Tess, meantime, was surveying her wet wrist 
gloomily. 

“I’ve lost my wrist-watch that Todd gave me in 
the water, Mrs. Harlan,” she offered finally, “and 
you really ought to buy me another one.” 

“Surely, you amazing child, surely.” 

“And Tommy will have to have a new pair of 
glasses.” 


MANHANDLED 


25 

“But weren't you wonderful to save his life as 
you didr 

“Oh, I can take care of boys/' the youngster said 
a little cockily. “Todd says I'm the best swimmer 
in Marysville—that is, next to him, of course.” 

If Tess's growing self-reliance during the years 
that followed disturbed Katherine McNair, it also 
in a way consoled her. For such self-reliance was a 
protection to the rapidly growing girl, a sort of 
guard-rail about her constantly increasing beauty. 
Once out of the coltish stage, the niece of Marys¬ 
ville's most respected spinster developed into an 
unquestionably pretty girl. 

As Mrs. John Harlan remarked to her neighbor, 
Miss McNair, the development of their friendship 
from mere neighborly politeness to a porch-and- 
porch intimacy dating from the afternoon of Tom¬ 
my's rescue six years before: “You should be very 
proud of Tess. I understand that she is quite the 
belle of the high school. The boys seem rather crazy 
about her.” 

“I do not believe in these puppy-love affairs,” 
commented Tess's guardian, her sharp gray eyes and 
nimble fingers intent upon her eternal knitting. “It's 
bad enough for young boys and girls to attend the 
same school at a susceptible age and be constantly 
thrown together during the day, not to speak o£ 


26 MANHANDLED! 

their association after school hours. Frankly, if I 
could afford it, I should send Tess to a girls" board¬ 
ing-school. And I shall be very glad, I can tell you, 
when she graduates from the high school and starts 
over to Parksburg to the normaL Though, good¬ 
ness knows, I shall miss her.” 

“I can imagine that,” sighed the sentimental Mrs. 
Harlan. “But I don’t think these high school dances 
and things do any harm. Young people will be 
young people, you know, and I’ll never forget what 
Tess said after she’d pulled poor little Tommy out 
of the sound. She looked up at me so pertly and 
said, ‘Oh, I can take care of boys.’ And I guess 
she’s right. Tess has a mind of her own.” 

iMiss McNair, who was quite aware of that, 
sighed in turn. 

“Almost the only serious argument I have ever 
had with the child has been; about these dances. I 
forbade her to go to dancing-school, you know, but 
she has picked dancing up anyway—where, I’m sure 
I don’t know. She’s so fond of fun and music and 
anything lively. She’s such a vivacious creature. 
She’s my sister Nora all over again. And she’s so 
forlorn and pathetic every time I refuse to let her 
go to those school affairs that I’ve finally had to 
yield. I’ve promised in fact that next year when 


MANHANDLED 


27 

she'll be seventeen and a senior, I’ll leave such things 
to her own judgment." 

Tess, radiantly clad' in a new pink bouffant taffeta 
evening-gown which, after a prolonged argument 
with her aunt, had been made low-necked and sleeve¬ 
less, attended the Senior Class Dance of the Marys¬ 
ville High School at Masonic Temple with no less a 
person than the president of her class and quite the 
“catch” of the school, Jim Hogan. It was the gala 
event of her young life, despite the fact that Jim 
“sat out” every dance. 

Jim, Marysville's prize athlete, captain of the 
school baseball and football teams, was the son of 
a quiet, mouselike widow whom he was frank in 
adoring. While there were scores of boys in “the 
high” who were more nattily dressed, more facile 
in conversation, more at ease with the girls, there 
was not a member of the more deadly sex in the 
big red-brick building who would not have aban¬ 
doned any of them for big, curly-haired, stalwart 
Jim with his wholesome smile and his unquestioned 
supremacy on the fxelds of athletic combat. 

Jim, however, was mildly averse to girls. He did 
not studiously ignore them, but what with his class- 
work and his athletics and the strenuous hours he 
put m out of school trying to help along his by no 


28 MANHANDLED 

means well-to-do mother to run their little establish¬ 
ment on not very fashionable Park Street, he simply 
had no time for the blandishments of the fain So 
he smiled back at the smiles and calculated flattery 
of the precocious little flirts of the school and treated 
all the girls with the same uniform quiet courtesy 
and respect. 

Tess was the first one to penetrate the vulnerable 
heel of this modem young Achilles. His first dawn¬ 
ing concern about her was the result of his chief 
interest, next to his mother, in life, his athletics. 
One late November afternoon, chancing to pass 
through the school gymnasium on his way to the 
locker-room whence he intended to remove his pre¬ 
cious football uniform for the winter, Jim saw that 
there was a girls* basketball game in progress and 
stopped by for a moment to watch. For a while 
the game seemed to him to consist of nothing but 
shrill feminine shrieks and the wild aimless dashing 
around of twelve bloomer-garbed and perspiring 
young Dianas after an elusive brown ball that spent 
most of its time bobbing crazily around on* the floor 
amid clutching fingers. Then a thirteenth girl ap¬ 
peared on the side-lines dressed for the fray, and, at 
the sight of her, a cry seemed to burst simultaneously 
from the throats of the six girls who wore the red 


MANHANDLED 29 

bands on their bare arms, “Here’s Tess at last! 
Where have you been ?” 

“Richards kept me in,” Tess, who stood quite 
close to Jim, answered carelessly. She accepted a 
red band from one of the six, and the game, which 
had been stopped temporarily, was resumed. 

From then on it was different Tess could play 
basketball. Quick, clever, her slim body under per¬ 
fect control, she seemed always in possession of the 
ball and always shooting baskets with deadly ac¬ 
curacy. Jim knew a real athlete when he saw one. 
He had never before noticed one among the girls. 
In three minutes she had captured his admiration 
and his heart. Forgetting his football suit, he 
stayed until the end of the game. 

He knew Tess by name. She was a member of 
his class. The other fellows were united in the 
opinion that she was the prettiest girl in the school. 
“A trifle snippy at times, but a good little sport and 
sure a pippin for looks,” ran the verdict. And Jim, 
not particularly interested, had hitherto tacitly ac¬ 
cepted it as true. 

Now 1 , her smooth cheeks flushed with exercise and' 
excitement, her fluffy brown hair pleasantly dishev¬ 
eled, and her lithe body showing to its full advantage 
in the abbreviated basketball suit, she seemed to him 


30 


MANHANDLED 


the acme of grace and athletic proficiency. His 
glance remained on her as she walked toward the 
showers and locker-room, a little ahead of the others. 

As she came near him, Jim, who had made a 
sudden decision and was visibly fussed, said as non¬ 
chalantly; as he could manage it, “You’re a great 
little basketballer, Tess.” 

Tess, theonly^one of the thirteen girls in the game 
who had not been aware of the presence of Marys¬ 
ville’^ famous athlete on the side-lines, turned to him 
with a sudden little start, recovered, and offered a 
characteristic retort. “Why, thanks. That’s sure 
praise from Sir Hubert, Jim.” 

Jim blushed. But he doggedly returned toi his 
purpose. 

“I -—Vm walking up your way, Tess. If you,like. 
I’ll wait till you dress and go up with you.” 

She looked at him in frank surprise, her piquant, 
slightly, freckled nose finally crinkling humorously. 
Here was the beginning of a conquest indeed !< As 
the recognized belle of the school, she had played 
around with the other boys, flirted with them with 
innocent pleasure and rapidly perfecting finesse, but 
up until now the famous Jim Hogan had never paid 
homage to her charms. She looked around at the 
other girls, wondering somewhat triun^phantly if 


MANHANDLED 


3i 

they had heard. But he had spoken in a low tone, 
and they were busy talking among themselves. 

Tess had long admired Jim for the same reason 
that Todd Harlan had early won her devotion. He 
could do things. Her violet-stippled eyes gazed at 
him now as frankly as a child’s, and she answered, 
“All right, Jim. Back in ten minutes.’* 

And she was. 


CHAPTER III 


T HE feeling that had taken root in the stalwart 
heart of young Jim Hogan and his ensuing 
predilection for Tess’s company was customarily and 
slangily termed in Marysville high school circles a 
“crush.” It was one of the unwritten social rules 
among the students that a recognized “crush” must 
never be put in jeopardy by the interference of a 
third party, particularly a “crush” that met with 
such general undergraduate approval as that of 
Marysville’s favorite athlete and its prettiest girl. 

In the weeks following their meeting in the gym¬ 
nasium, Tess, who had at first accepted Jim’s devo¬ 
tion in the manner of a careless young queen who 
has subdued an unusually stubborn subject, soon dis¬ 
covered there was a warmer strain within her that 
responded to his presence much as a spring flower 
drinks in the heat of the sun. Tess stumbled on 
the discovery that she was something more than a 
healthy young animal; she was becoming a woman. 

Katherine McNair was soon forced to admit Jim 
Hogan into her scheme of things, though she pro¬ 
tested at the regularity of his calls, advancing the 
32 


MANHANDLED 


33 


theory that Tess was quite too young to be devoting 
so much time and attention to one youth. But Miss 
McNair’s niece had discovered that a ripple of 
laughter (which in Tess resembled sparkling water 
cascading over a very high rock) and a swift wrap¬ 
ping of her strong young arms around her aunt’s 
wrinkled neck worked wonders in making that es¬ 
timable lady change her mind and change it invaria¬ 
bly to Tess’s advantage. 

Jim was quite sure, when June came around, that 
Tess would perish utterly if she did not attend the 
senior class dance which was to precede immediately 
the commencement exercises at which both of them 
were to receive their diplomas. Indeed she told him, 
with a glance that was not without its significance, 
that her aunt had yielded permission for her to go. 
And so, though he couldn’t dance, he invited her 
to go with him. He was sure he was in for a 
hectic evening, and was not at all confident that his 
late father’s tuxedo (which he customarily wore on 
state occasions) was worthy of such a charming 
creature as Tess. She, with difficulty, refrained 
from hugging him on the spot 

In moments of high exhilaration Tess had ex¬ 
changed a few meaningless kisses with other boys. 
She was not a prude, though she by no means ap¬ 
proved of the mauling and manhandling that some 


MANHANDLED 


34 

of her schoolmates affected in the tonneaus of auto¬ 
mobiles and the cockpits of sailboats and motor* 
craft on the sound. 

“No, Freddie, I don’t go in for that stuff,” had 
been her casual answer to one amorous young Yale 
freshman who had been very ambitious with his 
arms in her own sailboat. And that, considering the 
decisive manner in which she said it, had then, as 
usual, been enough. Jim did not attempt to “pet” 
her, and, though she was uncertain whether or not 
she wanted him to, she liked him all the more be¬ 
cause he didn’t. 

Tess had danced at a few private parties not or¬ 
ganized primarily for that purpose and the lively 
spirit of Nora McGuire, on such occasions, worked 
unconsciously within her to make her sensitive 
young body exult at the barbaric rhythm of “jazz.” 
But the senior dance, for which she as a member of 
the committee in charge had worked for almost a 
week, served to transform the rather cold-looking 
interior of Masonic Temple into a gay pastel pink- 
and-blue shrine of Terpsichore. And it was the first 
public occasion of the kind which she had ever at¬ 
tended. 

Tess was as excited as a prospective bride. Ex¬ 
cited, and, though intending to render Jim her full 
measure of devotion, a little apprehensive. 


MANHANDLED 


35 


“I don’t mind a bit that you don’t dance, Jim,” 
she assured him a few evenings before the mo¬ 
mentous event. “I’ll gladly sit out with you. But 
you won’t care if I dance a little with other boys, 
will you? I’m simply crazy about dancing, you 
know.” 

Her soft mouth looked so wistful that at the 
moment he would gladly have exchanged all his gold 
footballs for the ability to “swing a mean pair of 
dogs,” as, for instance, Scotty Trevor could. 

“Oh, go ahead, Tess, dance all you like,” was 
his final reply. “Have a good time. I’ll find lots 
to do. And I wouldn’t crab your fun for the 
world” 

But of course, poor Jim didn’t quite mean all 
he said. 

And when, amid the gay throng of girls in their 
filmiest best and boys in immaculate “cake-eating 
togs” and the din of jazz from the band brought 
over from the county-seat and the benignly smiling 
chaperons on the side-lines, Jim glanced covertly 
away from the slightly constrained young lady he 
was “sitting it out” with on the two very hard 
wooden chairs he caught a glimpse of the gloriously 
happy and mysteriously radiant Tess smiling up into 
the face of Scotty Trevor as the latter maneuvered 
her so expertly through the crowd, Jim began to 


MANHANDLED 


3^ 

suspect that dancing was one of the more important 
accomplishments known to man. He wondered if 
Scotty, a notorious “lady-killer,” wasn’t holding 
Tess a bit too tightly, if the flush that stained her 
smooth cheeks when Scotty brought her back to him 
was altogether due to the fact that the room was un¬ 
comfortably warm. She seemed to sense his 
thought. 

*'‘Won’t you try to dance with me just once, 
Jim?” she begged him, somewhat too eagerly, when 
they were alone again. “I don’t mind) if you walk 
all over my shoes—truly I don’t.” 

But Jim, stout-hearted as a lion in any other field 
of endeavor, did not feel equal to it. So he was 
obliged to spend most of the gala June night watch¬ 
ing her slim body within the arms of moist-browed 
youths whom he surpassed in everything save the 
gentle art of synchronizing feet to music. The only 
occasions on which he snatched a word with Tess 
were between dances. Yet when he stood in the 
middle of a morosely jocular sentence an eager 
swain came hustling up for her. During the inter¬ 
mission, when they were two of twenty cooling their 
parched throats with ice-cream while their over¬ 
heated bodies risked pneumonia by the only window 
through which a breeze was stirring, his sagging 
spirits rose again at the thought of her nearness. 


MANHANDLED 


37 

As the festivities wore to a close around two in 
the morning and the chaperons were becoming 
sleepy and negligent and the dancers tired and care¬ 
less, it seemed to Jim, who was the only wide-awake 
spectator-person present, that the bars of propriety 
were slightly wabbling. Hot cheek was pressed 
against hot cheek in certain quarters. Varieties of 
steps, practised in after-midnight cabarets but 
banned in Marysville, were making their appear¬ 
ance, goaded on by the apparently tireless orchestra 
from the county-seat. 

Tess seemed to have succumbed to the general 
laxity. She had danced three times with Scotty 
Trevor, and that overly sophisticated young “jazz- 
hound’^’ appeared to be enjoying the last one best of 
all. And so was Tess. A vague resentment took 
root in the breast of Jim Hogan. He didn’t mind 
playing the role of wall-flower, and he wasn’t selfish, 
but he couldn’t help feeling that Tess was abandon¬ 
ing herself with just a little too much pleasure to 
the physical company of these other boys. He was 
rather glad and relieved when at last the band swung 
into Home Sweet Home, and a few moments later, 
Tess, flushed and tired-eyed but very happy and 
looking still adorable in her filmy evening cloak, was 
standing, her arm thrust intimately in his, out upon 
the crowded sidewalk calling good-bys to the others. 


38 


MANHANDLED 


“Oh, I’ve had simply a gorgeous time, Jim/’ she 
bubbled ecstatically to him as they started walking 
the short distance to the McNair house. 

He muttered a reply. He was still brooding. 
The whir of self-starters coming from the cars that 
many of the young blades had borrowed from their 
parents for the evening seemed to add to his discon¬ 
tent Why didn’t he have a car too? Tess seemed 
perfectly content to walk, but why did the others 
have all the things that girls like her seemed to re¬ 
quire ? 

She noticed his preoccupation. 

“Didn’t you have a good time, Jim?” she ven¬ 
tured, glancing a little guiltily into his unnaturally 
glum face. 

“Oh, sure,” he said. But he said it without con¬ 
viction. 

An austere moon beamed calmly down upon them, 
and in the early morning silence the waters of the 
sound, stirred by the gentle breeze, made a queer 
little plopping noise down by the Harlan pier. He 
turned the key in the lock for her and then stepped 
back, looking at her intently. Never had he liked 
this lovely female creature, so filled with vibrant 
life, so deliciously feminine, as much as now, never 
had he desired— 

She gazed at him, a questioning light in her shad- 


MANHANDLED 


39 


owy eyes. Suddenly sweeping her into his strong 
arms, he, without quite knowing why, kissed her 
full upon the lips. 

She uttered a stifled little cry of surprise. Re¬ 
leasing her almost as quickly as he had seized her, 
he stood confused, half frightened and half defiant. 
For an instant she kept her flushed face lowered so 
that he could not read it, and then, raising it, she 
looked at him squarely. Then she said quietly 
enough: “Jim, why did you do that?” 

Her tone indicated neither acquiescence nor cen¬ 
sure. 

“I—I don’t know,” he confessed. “You’re so 
pretty—and you know I like you—and the others 
had you all evening.” 

“You weren’t jealous of—the others, were you, 
Jim?” 

“No,” he lied stoutly. 

Her accustomed high spirits were returning. 

“I’m entitled to a good time once in a while, I 
think.” 

“Well, I guess you had it—and I guess the fel¬ 
lows who danced with you did too.” 

“What do you mean, Jim?” Her voice was omi¬ 
nously steady. 

He read the danger signal. He answered, “Noth¬ 
ing.” 


40 


MANHANDLED 


She liked Jim. She was not sure after all whether 
she was disappointed or not that he had kissed her. 
But though she was certain he was doing her an in¬ 
justice in the implied reproof that had followed, 
she stood without the heart to start a quarrel with 
him. So she held out a cool, tanned little hand and 
said cheerfully, “Good night—and thank you.” 

For the first time in months, Tess did not sleep 
very well during what remained of darkness. She 
was wondering whether Jim was not, after all, right, 
whether her passion for dancing had not led her to 
permit a few petty liberties. 

By the time the tottering old Methodist minister, 
who had been performing the same duty for twenty 
years, on a close June night, a week later, had 
handed them their diplomas with trembling fingers, 
and solemnly welcomed them out into the “wide, 
wide world” at the high school commencement exer¬ 
cises, Tess and Jim had already formed their sep¬ 
arate plans for the future. Jim was mechanically 
inclined and nursed a secret yet stubborn longing to 
enter Boston Tech, had the family budget permitted 
it. But no such chance presented itself. So when 
he was offered a position in Hammer’s Garage, in 
Marysville, as a substitute, he accepted it. Not that 
he intended to be contented with filling transient 
gasoline tanks, washing cars, and learning the rudi- 



A Paramount Picture . Manhandled . 

TESS RESENTED SELLING MARKED-DOWN MERCHANDISE. 













MANHANDLED 


4i 


merits of the mechanics’ trade, in which, from four 
summers of employment at Hammer’s, he was al¬ 
ready somewhat proficient. Jim had several 
“hunches” in the line of automobile accessories that 
he hoped to work out into successful and lucrative 
inventions. 

Tess was to enter the normal school at Parksburg, 
fifteen miles inland, in the fall, not because she par¬ 
ticularly desired to be a school-teacher, but because 
her Aunt Katherine had been urging it on and off 
for ten years. And, after all, it would be a change 
from Marysville and a chance to embark into a 
slightly different world. 

Late that September, Jim drove one of Hammer’s 
Fords with Tess and her aunt and the baggage 
through the crisp early morning sunshine and the 
scurrying yellow-stained leaves down to the station. 
None of the three said much, but even the emotion¬ 
less face of 'Miss McNair was having a hard time 
maintaining its usual calm. Up until this moment, 
Tess had been breezy as a lark and had been thrilled 
by a trip to Boston to accumulate her wardrobe and 
as a reward for graduation. But it seemed now to 
have thoroughly dawned upon her that she was 
leaving the only home she had ever known and the 
protecting arms of the two people who cared most 
foil her. And 'the occasion was a sobering one. 


42 


MANHANDLED 


They stood rather pathetically together on the sta¬ 
tion platform. And then, two minutes before train 
time, Tess, making a sudden and tingling resolution, 
nudged Jim and he followed her softly around the 
corner where the trunks and boxes were piled con- 
cealingly high. 

The eyes of Tess, so frequently mocking and mis¬ 
chievous and keen, were now subdued and shiny. 

“Ell miss you, Jim,” she told him softly, and one 
hand moved up to the lapel of his coat with the 
effect of a caress. For a moment they stood there 
in silence. 

His handsome face looked very forlorn. So pa¬ 
thetically forlorn did it seem that she rose on tiptoe 
and with a graceful movement of swift abandon, 
flung her arms about him and kissed him—their first 
kiss since the impromptu one after the dance. Then 
she turned and walked quickly back to her aunt. 
Jim followed her, on air, wavering a little in his 
steps as the Parksburg train swung into the station. 

As Katherine McNair, blowing her thin nose to 
conceal from Jim the true state of her feelings, was 
driven back to her empty house, she wondered if 
there was really something significant in the look of 
flushed understanding that had passed between Tess 
and young Hogan as the train pulled out. 


CHAPTER IV 


(< TN a battle of wits with our Tess,” languidly 

X offered the bobbed-haired straw-blonde who 
was stretched leggily out on the window-seat, “I 
wouldn’t concede a mere man a chance, particularly 
a seedy old psychology prof like Haskell.” 

“What was the row about, anyway?” asked the 
plump brunette with the tortoise-shelled glasses. 
She spoke from the depths of a slightly crippled 
Morris chair beside the littered study-table which 
occupied the center of the plainly furnished dormi¬ 
tory-room. 

The third of the lounging trio, who was seated 
with her hands clasped about one crossed knee and 
was Tess’s roommate and the impromptu hostess of 
the moment, felt that question to be addressed to 
her. She started to answer, but stopped short as 
the door swung open and Tess herself entered. 

“Well, ladies,” she called out buoyantly, “all gath¬ 
ered to sing my swan-song?” 

“No, assembled to join in the triumphant chorus,” 
returned the blonde on the window-seat, who had 
done Tess the honor of pulling her lazy body up to 
a sitting position of attention. 

43 


44 


MANHANDLED! 


‘Tell us about it, my dear,” came from Miss 
Tortoise-Shell. 

The violet eyes of Tess, who seemed to have ma¬ 
tured materially and to have grown slightly taller 
though not an ounce broader during her year and 
a half at Parksburg Normal, still held a glint of the 
exciting mischief inspired by her recent interview 
with Professor John Haskell. 

“What is there to tell?” she countered with 
feigned innocence. “I'm not fired. Slightly repri¬ 
manded, to be sure, in Professor Doctor Haskell's 
most dignified and hurt manner. You were in 
‘psych’ this morning. You saw him pounce upon 
me, and then demand that I show him my book. 
The rest was just the normal vanity of a man who 
sees his pet apple-cart upset.” 

“Oh, can that bunk, Tess,” interrupted Claire 
Murdock, her roommate, “and tell us what really 
happened. These dirt-diggers are simply burning 
up with curiosity.” 

“All right—here's my story and I'm going to 
stick to it: You know Haskell’s system. He has 
us read a couple of paragraphs from the book and 
then 'interpret' them, as the dear old granny calls it. 
And you also know he’s slightly deaf and a perfectly 
rotten disciplinarian. And, to force us to pay at¬ 
tention, he's developed the disagreeable habit of call- 


MANHANDLED 


45 


ing upon the ones who, he thinks, have their minds 
off the recitation and' don’t know the place, so that 
he can give them a nice fat zero when they fall 
down, plump!” 

Tess paused a moment for breath. 

“Well, I’ve simply been taking advantage of his 
system. I prepare only two paragraphs of the whole 
lesson. When the recitation reaches that point, I 
turn around and start whispering to somebody near 
me. "Ah,’ thinks Haskell, ‘here’s a victim!’ ‘Miss 
McGuire, recite please!’ he barks. Up rises poor 
Tess, and does perfectly. And, of course, the old 
boy is sore as a boil. He’s been watching me for 
months, and to-day I suppose he saw me make a 
mark in my book, which is my private way of keep¬ 
ing track of the place. So he thought he’d found 
something out. Whereupon the old bird asked to 
see my book, and then told me to come to his study 
at three this afternoon.” 

“How thrilling,” murmured the window-seat 
lady, her tone in direct contradiction to her words. 
“And what did he say to you ?” 

“He started bawling me out, and I simply told 
him the truth. I told him it was a flat case of thief 
catching thief. I said I thought his system was 
unfair, and I considered myself justified in beating 
it if I could. And I do, too.” 


4 6 


MANHANDLED 


“You had your nerve with you,” commented the 
brunette, rising with some difficulty from the cush¬ 
ioned Morris chair. “But you’ve got all these men 
profs buffaloed, Tess—even old Haskell, the worst 
crab of the lot” 

Tess, who had tossed the disputed book into the 
vacated Morris chair and pushed back some of the 
litter on the table to make a place for herself beside 
her roommate, was still glowing with a slightly 
guilty self-satisfaction. 

“Use your heads, my dears,” she bantered gaily, 
“and you can always beat the men.” 

But when the others had gone, she slid from the 
table and, going to the window, gazed rather pre- 
occupiedly down upon the trim campus. She even 
sighed a little Parksburg Normal was a strictly 
up-to-date institution as far as material equipment 
went, what with its broad, well-kept grounds and 
its modern light and airy work-buildings and its 
dormitories of native field-stone. Tess liked the 
girls, too. True, there was not one of them who 
inspired her with any mental brilliance or , swayed 
her by any unusually colorful personality. Coming 
mostly from the farms and small towns of Connecti¬ 
cut, they were a wholesome, optimistic lot who for 
the most part were quite frank in admitting they did 
not intend to make pedagogy their career but con- 


MANHANDLED 


47 


sidered it a convenient stop-gap between a teacher’s 
license and marriage. And a much larger portion 
of their conversation was about men than about edu¬ 
cation. 

Tess was popular enough among them. She was 
pretty, witty, even sharp-tongued at times, and she 
had a boundless energy. If they “kidded” her good- 
naturedly about the books of rather “highbrow” 
character that she had read' for pleasure and if they 
chided her about the drawing-board and crayons and 
box of paints that she used assiduously in odd mo¬ 
ments, their criticism was not without its alloy of 
admiration. Tess was different. Tess was far too 
attractive, they agreed, to become a school-teacher, 
and there were prophecies that some man would 
gobble her up before she had taught her first class. 
The few men who came into her rather conventual 
life as a student at Parksburg, however, did not, 
any of them, seem to have made any discernible im¬ 
pression on her. 

Tess, still gazing out of the window, at length 
turned to her roommate, who was regarding her 
own finger-nails and pondering if she should take 
them down to the one manicure-shop in town and 
give them an expensive treat. 

“Claire, what are you going to make out of your 
life anyway?” was Tess’s unexpected question. 


48 


MANHANDLED 


Claire looked up in surprise, though’ she was by 
this time used to Tess’s abrupt and incongruous 
queries. 

“Oh, teach school a while and then marry some 
nice man with more money than brains, I suppose,” 
she answered. 

“And you’ll be satisfied with that?” 

“I guess I’ll have to be.” Claire sighed indiffer¬ 
ently at her sad fate. 

“I won’t.” 

Young Miss Murdock regarded her with some 
curiosity. 

“What will you do about it, Birdie?” 

Tess’s small chin was set firmly and her eyes nar¬ 
rowed a bit. She was looking much further than 
she could possibly see across the Parksburg campus, 
and she seemed almost oblivious of her room-mate. 

“I could never be satisfied as a school-teacher, 
noh as a housewife with a forty-two waist-line and 
a pack of children. There’s something in me that 
calls for more than that. If only I could get a 
chance on the stage or at painting, or something! 
Some day I’m going to New York and try. If I’m 
beaten, all right—I’ll have had my chance.” 

She had never before revealed herself thus open¬ 
ly to her roommate. There was everything about 
jolly, empty-headed, pleasure-loving Claire to invite 


MANHANDLED 


49 


the lightsomeness that was so integral a part of 
Tess’s nature, rather than fertilize the serious am¬ 
bition that was underneath. 

Tess looked at Claire a moment with eyes bright¬ 
ened by the emotions that her own words had 
conjured up. ,Then she added carelessly, “Let’s go 
down to town and get a sundae.” 

Claire was regarding her curiously and asked, 
“Don’t you like it here, Tess?” 

“Oh, yes. I’ve had a jolly time, but I’m not 
sorry we’re finishing in three months.” 

“I dare say girls who stay home have a lot more 
fun than we do,” Claire opined. 

“Undoubtedly. There’s not much joy about 
learning to be an old-maid school-teacher, old girl.” 
Tess stretched her slim arms and yawned. “I don’t 
know what’s the matter with me. But I’m just 
about dying for a touch of excitemment of some 
sort. If only some young Lochinvar would come 
dashing in from the West at this moment! I guess 
he could carry me away with about two pounds of 
salted pecans and two seconds of persuasion.” 

Claire calculated an instant. She walked over 
and slipped on to the window-seat close to Tess. 

“I’m sneaking out to-night and motoring down to 
Cresswell to the movies with Fred Blake. It 
wouldn’t gum the game if you came along. I can 


MANHANDLED 


50 

phone Fred to get another man when we walk down 
to town.” 

She waited, expectantly hopeful. 

Tess laughed. It was against the rules for the 
girls to leave the campus after dark without permis¬ 
sion, but Claire was such a chronic lawbreaker that 
Tess saw nothing extraordinary in her proposal,— 
except that ordinarily Claire’s fellow-conspirators, 
mostly raw-boned, awkward-tongued farmer boys, 
did not interest her. But the Parksburg routine for 
several months, and particularly the recent childish 
exhibition by the learned Professor Haskell, had 
been rasping Tess’s sensitive nature toward rebellion. 
Making a resolution that was almost as surprising 
to herself as it was to Claire, she spiritedly replied, 
“All right, I’m with you.” 

And, once committed to the escapade, she walked 
down to the village in high spirits with Claire and 
listened outside the open door of the telephone-booth 
vaguely stirred by Claire’s end of the conversation 
with the invisible Fred. Returning to her room in 
a spirit of oddly smoldering excitement, she donned 
the most festive of her informal gowns. 

They met the boys where the Dodge sedan was 
parked in the shadow just outside the campus gate. 
Tess was introduced and assisted into the tonneau 
by her escort, while Claire snuggled in beside Fred 


MANHANDLED 


5i 

Blake at the wheel. Fred, of whom Tess had been 
hearing tales for months, was, she decided at once, 
a dud. He was a moist blond with pale blue eyes 
and an uninteresting face beaten red by his daily 
toil on his father’s fruit-farm, located just outside 
Parksburg. His rather weak chin supported the 
sullen mouth of a spoiled only child, and he seemed 
content to reply in monosyllables to Claire’s ani¬ 
mated chatter as they slid through Parksburg and 
along the macadam road leading to CresswelL 
Tess’s seat-mate, whose name she had caught as 
Walter Hovey, was a dark, more sophisticated type. 
Young Blake’s car, probably from the rough treat¬ 
ment it habitually received, squeaked and bumped 
considerably, and conversation was not easy. Never¬ 
theless, in five minutes, Tess’s escort, who seemed 
to be crowding her a little more than was necessary 
with his heavily overcoated body, managed in a 
nasal voice to let her know that he was the new 
assistant teller at the Parksburg Bank, that he con¬ 
sidered Parksburg a “one-horse dump” and Tess a 
very attractive girl, and that New York was really 
the only town equal to a man of his caliber and jazz- 
hounding abilities. Tess was at first mildly dis¬ 
gusted by his obvious conceit and his increasing at¬ 
tempts at familiarity, then amused and inclined to 
egg on his exercises in self-esteem. 


5 2 


MANHANDLED 


The noisy quartette covered the five miles to 
Cresswell at a pace far in excess of the law and, 
succeeding in edging the car into the last remaining 
inch of parking-space beyond the brightly lighted 
square, waited in the lobby of the movie theater, 
and were regaled by Hovey with spirited accounts 
of the last musical comedy he had seen on Broad¬ 
way, while Fred stood* in line to buy tickets for the 
second show. Tess would have enjoyed the picture, 
a Gloria Swanson society-drama, and shared Claire’s 
rapturous remarks about the star’s elaborate ward¬ 
robe, had Walter Hovey kept his obtrusive knees 
and his wandering hands more to himself. But Tess 
was not in a mood to be critical. She felt sure of 
her ability to handle this smart young expatriated 
New Yorker, if need be. 

“How about something to eat and drink?” Fred 
asked as they were streaming out after the show. 

“We’ll stop at the Kenilworth,” said Hovey, aj>- 
parently taking charge of the party. Claire glanced 
at Fred and seemed about to protest. She knew the 
Kenilworth from first-hand experience. Tess had 
never been there. But she had heard of the rather 
doubtful reputation of that unpretentious wooden 
hostelry, which they had passed about half a mile 
from Cresswell on their way in. 

“I really think we should be getting back,” she 


MANHANDLED 


53 


advanced mildly to Claire. The exhilaration of the 
wind-lashed ride and the vivacious stuff she had 
been seeing upon the screen were not without their 
effects. 

“Oh, we can stop just a minute,” persuaded 
Claire. And Tess, who had not had a meal out¬ 
side the Parksburg Normal dining-hall for several 
months, gave doubtful assent. 

Seated in the garish and almost deserted dining- 
hall of the Kenilworth, she pretended no surprise 
and said, “No, thank you,” when Hovey, having 
held a whispered conversation with the fat, hard¬ 
eyed head-waiter at the door, whispered, “Do you 
girls want something to drink?” 

Claire refused the offered potion also. The two 
boys elaborately drained two vitriolic cocktails from 
teacups, and the quartette nibbled at shabby club 
sandwiches, though Walter, warmed already by the 
liquor, protested that there were lots better items 
on the menu. 

Tess was becoming a bit uneasy as their escorts, 
having finished their food, drained another highball 
apiece, particularly as Blake, who had to drive the 
car, while much quieter than Walter, was evidently 
less used to stimulants and more affected by them. 

“It’s time to go now,” Tess at length rose and 
announced. 


54 


MANHANDLED 


“Oh, don’t crab the party,” Hovey protested. 
“We’re just getting acquainted.” He attempted to 
seize her hand and draw her down into her chair 
again, but she eluded his slightly unsteady grasp. 

Claire, who, Tess had observed, was openly de¬ 
voted to Fred and seemed on intimate enough terms 
with him, apparently saw nothing to be concerned 
about. When Tess insisted on setting the party 
into motion, however, Claire, who was used to sub¬ 
mitting to her roommate’s stauncher personality, 
looked up from her low-voiced tete-a-tete with the 
now red-faced Fred and acquiesced. 

“Tess is right We’ll have to run along.” And 
so, their slightly muddled young gallants muttering 
protests, they walked out into the nipping air to 
where the car was parked. 

No sooner had Fred whirred the starter and 
bounced out into the main road than* Tess perceived 
that she had rather a problem on her hands. That 
problem was Walter. 

“Oh, come on, can’t you be nice to me?” he urged 
as she slid away from his ambitious arms. Claire 
in the front seat had removed her hat and was rest¬ 
ing her close-cropped straw-colored head upon 
Fred’s shoulder, which did not materially assist his 
driving. 

“Don’t be silly,” Tess told Walter. She spoke 


MANHANDLED 


55 


sharply, and, because his alcohol-flavored breath was 
scenting up the stuffy air within the car, she tugged 
at the window and lowered it a little, refusing his 
clumsy attempt to reach over her and help. 

He laughed unpleasantly. 

“Heard the story of the girl who was so nice, and 
had to walk home from so many automobile rides, 
that her mother gave her a road-map for Christ¬ 
mas ?” he derided, and laughed again. 

“Perhaps she found the walking more pleasant,” 
rejoined Tess. 

“Though colder.” 

“A little cold air certainly wouldn’t do us any 
harm.” 

And as he reached determinedly for her, she 
thrust two hard little fists into his chest and pushed 
him away, pushing him away with a strength that 
he probably could not imagine existed in her slim 
firm body. 

She was thoroughly aroused now. 

“You sit down there and behave yourself,” she 
snapped. “I’m not going to be mauled, and you 
might as well make the best of it. It’ll only last a 
half-hour.” 

But deep within her she could not help admitting 
to herself that there was something not unattractive 
about a man’s arm reaching for her in the warm 


MANHANDLED 


S6 

dark. If he had been somebody else, Jim perhaps, 
she would likely have permitted him to fondle her, 
and might even have responded. 

However, she had but an instant to play with this 
thought, for in the next the head-lights of another 
car swooped down upon them, Fred’s machine 
lurched so violently to the right as to fling her nearly 
into Walter’s lap, and a series of sharp bumps amid 
screeching metal sent the sedan almost into the ditch. 

They had sideswiped the other machine, though 
Fred did not stop to see what damage had been 
done either to his own car or the stranger’s. He 
followed Walter’s husky injunction to “step on it” 
and went racing on into the pitch-black night. Claire 
stared back with white, frightened face at Tess, 
then hesitantly crouched down into the seat again. 

Tess now knew that Fred, undoubtedly made reck¬ 
less by the unaccustomed liquor, presented a greater 
danger than Walter. In her preoccupation with her 
amorous escort, she had not noticed the speed they 
had been making and the crazy way they were wal¬ 
loping from one side of the road to the other. But 
now a black tree sped by not a foot from her nose, 
and Fred every minute seemed to be pressing farther 
down upon the accelerator. 

“I’ll show your friend how the old ’bus can 
travel,” she heard him mutter to Claire, and he 


MANHANDLED 57 

caused Tess’s heart to lose another beat as he re¬ 
moved one arm from the wheel and circled Claire's 
shoulder with it 

Tess wondered how soon they would be crossing 
the Sheldon Pike, one of the most traveled-thorough¬ 
fares of the county. As if in answer, a pair of 
head-lights flashed suddenly just ahead and to the 
left. Slowing down not one whit, Fred flashed his 
car across the intersecting macadam, seemingly right 
into the blazing glow of the other car, which had 
reached the cross-roads at the same instant. An 
emergency brake screamed, and Tess heard the 
shout and caught a glimpse of the horrified face of 
the man in the braked runabout as they whisked by, 
clearing his radiator by an inch. Unconsciously she 
had reached forward and gripped the rug-rod with 
clenched hands, set for the crash. 

Recovering, she now called out sharply to Fred, 
“Slow down!” It was time, she thought grimly, to 
assume command. If this sort of thing went on it 
meant an accident, and an accident meant they might 
all be hurt or killed. And at the best the school 
authorities would discover Claire's and her own in¬ 
fraction of the rules against leaving their room at 
night without permission. And she, for one, had 
no wish to risk; expulsion for the sake of two such 
duds as Fred and [Walter. 


MANHANDLED 


58 

When Fred answered by piling on more speed, 
Tess, now thoroughly aroused, leaned forward, 
shook him and commanded, “Stop the car, you 
blithering idiot!” 

There was something about that imperiously con¬ 
temptuous voice that struck tinder in the befoggled 
brain of the farmer boy. He finally obeyed. 

Bringing the car to a gradual standstill by the 
side of the wooded road, he turned stupidly about 
and asked, “Wassa matter ?” 

Tess snapped on the light inside the sedan and 
soon saw from his blurred eyes that her interference 
was sufficiently justified. But, deciding now that 
diplomacy was the best policy, she stifled her anger 
and said pleasantly enough, “You and Fred sit back 
here, Claire. I’ll drive for a change.” 

Fred turned blankly to Claire, “Wassa idea? I 
can drive good enough.” 

“Certainly you can,” Tess prevaricated invitingly, 
“but wouldn’t you like to come back here where it’s 
more comfortable?” 

“Yes, come on, Fred,” urged Claire, upon whom 
Tess’s idea began to dawn. 

And so, Hovey dissenting, the change was made, 
and Tess, who during her vacations had been taught 
to drive several makes of cars by Jim Hogan, first 
assistant at Hammer’s Garage, assumed the wheel 


MANHANDLED 59 

and brought the party at sensible speed and without 
incident to the main gate of the school. 

When, having been secretly admitted to the dormi¬ 
tory by previous arrangement with a chum, they had 
gained their room and were undressing in the dark, 
Gaire asked, “How did you like Fred, Tess?” 

“Fred is a fathead,” Tess answered with heat 
and conviction. 

The* usually mild and acquiescing Claire bristled. 

“He’s not as much of a fathead as your smart- 
aleck Walter.” 

“My Walter? Oh, my dear, have a heart.” Tess 
was rather proud of the command she had taken of 
the evening and inclined to lord it a bit. 

“Well, he blew you to the show and the supper,” 
said Claire. “You might have been nice to him in¬ 
stead of snapping him off as you did. You can’t 
expect men to take you out if you don’t treat them 
right.” 

“Is that your system?” sniffed Tess. “If it is, 
it’s a pretty rotten one. I don’t propose to be man¬ 
handled by anybody I don’t like. And I’m no prude, 
either.” And, slipping under the cold sheet of the 
twin bed, she was almost instantly sleeping the sleep 
of the young, the beautiful and the conscience-clear. 

Three days later, Tess dashed up to her room be¬ 
tween classes, to find a note in Claire’s writing rest- 


6o MANHANDLED 

ing upon the book which she needed for her next 
recitation. 

Good-by, Tess dear. Fred and I are driving to 
New London to be married this afternoon. Give 
my love to the rest of the girls and tell them. 

Claire. 

Poor, foolish, romantic Claire! Married to that 
lout of a farmer boy. Tess stared blankly at the 
hastily scrawled paper. Her feeling was a mingling 
of pity for Claire and hurt pride that she hadn't been 
consulted. She recalled the first time she had seen 
the new Mrs. Blake, in the registry office of the 
school, where Claire, a helpless novice from a small 
town in southern Connecticut, had seemed about to 
burst into tears over the complexities of filling out 
entrance-papers and choosing courses. Tess, by 
chance next to her, had helped her, conversed at 
length with the shy simple stranger, and then, be¬ 
cause she had to find a roommate and judged Claire 
to be easy to get along with, and, perhaps also be¬ 
cause we always enjoy associations with our infe¬ 
riors in character and mind rather than with our 
superiors, suggested they share quarters. 

She pictured Claire as the wife of Fred. Long 
monotonous days on a fruit-farm, with occasional 
forays in to the movies at Cresswell, when the roads 
of that barren rural region weren't blocked with 


MANHANDLED 


6r 


mud or snow; three meals a day with that red, un¬ 
inspiring, prematurely aged face of his across the 
table. 

Tess sighed. Well, it was not for her, Tess Mc¬ 
Guire. She needed color and occasional excitement. 
She would insist upon at least a try at the bustling 
roar of big city life. She could, she felt, become 
a successful actress, for instance, if the opportunity 
were given her. And certainly there would be a 
market for the products of her facile pencil and 
brush, which the drawing-instructor at Normal and 
all her friends had esteemed quite extraordinary. 
She could never be content as a school-teacher in a 
town like Marysville. There was a restless some¬ 
thing that kept gnawing at her, especially now that 
spring was coming after the bleak New England 
winter. This vague something made her long to 
break the chains of nineteen eventless years. It 
subordinated Aunt Katherine and Jim Hogan and 
all her past to a position of small importance com¬ 
pared with the crying need of giving the real Tess 
McGuire a chance to live, live, live! 

That afternoon, in the midst of an animated, 
half-envious, half-cynical discussion of Claire’s 
elopement, carried on by her best friends seated 
on what was until that day Claire’s bed, Tess 
stooped down to pick up the letter that had just been 


62 


MANHANDLED 


thrust through her mail-slot. She discovered that 
it was from Jim. It was in his usual direct, almost 
impersonal style, and its important news hinged on 
the message that his mother had suffered another 
heart-attack and was very seriously ilL Though 
making an obvious attempt not to pass along his 
* trouble to Tess, Jim revealed, in the few lines in 
which he described his mother’s misfortune, a deep 
concern over the outcome. 

Tess was moved. She knew pale little ‘Mrs. Ho¬ 
gan slightly, and Jim’s unfailing devotion to his 
mother was one of his attractions. 

While the others chattered like gay magpies over 
a fresh worm, she stood absorbedly near the window 
and thought of Jim. Marysville had already accept¬ 
ed them as sweethearts. She spent most of her vaca¬ 
tions with him, and they exchanged letters two and 
three times a week. Good old Jim! Their high- 
school affair had ripened and deepened and, in her 
present course, some day she would probably marry 
[him. In her present course. She unconsciously 
lifted her head, and her strong young body tautened. 

Well, was she going to keep on in her present 
fcourse? Wasn’t marrying Jim just about the same 
as Claire marrying Fred? He was just a mechanic 
in a Marysville garage, with little chance of even 
owning the business, for his employer was a com- 


MANHANDLED 


63 


paratively young man and Jim could save nothing 
of importance from his small-town salary. Unless, 
of course, some of the inventions upon which he 
was always working should bear fruit. ^Vhich was 
a long chance. 

“Why so pensive, ^Tess—envying your roomy?” 
came a bantering voice from the bed. Tess tossed 
her head, as if to banish her thoughts with the move¬ 
ment, laughed, and joined them. . . . 

A month later, after Jim’s letters for several 
weeks had seemed to indicate that his mother was 
recovering what passed, with her, for good health, 
■word was unexpectedly sent to Tess, while she was 
preparing to go down to the dining-hall for the eve¬ 
ning meal, that a visitor was awaiting her in the 
reception-room at the main building. Wondering 
who it could be, and in the sudden fear that some¬ 
thing had happened to her aunt, she hurried over 
and found Jim standing there, white, tired-eyed, and 
dressed soberly in black. His appearance checked 
her exuberant greeting, and she drew him silently 
away from the ugly oaken desk, behind which the 
owl-eyed instructress on duty regarded them curi¬ 
ously. The two moved slowly over to a settee. 
Jim’s husky frame sank gratefully down into the 
cushion in a huddled way that was not at all usual 
with him. 


6 4 


MANHANDLED 


“My mother died a week ago,” he said slowly. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” and involuntary tears welled 
into her violet eyes. 

“I sold our place. I felt I couldn’t stay there a 
minute without her,” he went on, groping heavily 
and pathetically for her understanding, and at last 
finding it. “I didn’t want even to stay in Marys¬ 
ville. So I threw up my job, and I’m going to New 
York. Frank Hammer—he’s been pretty decent to 
me—wrote to a friend of his and got me a place 
there at the same kind of work I was doing for 
him. I realized a little money out of the house, and 
I’m on my way now. But first I thought you’d like 
to know.” 

“Of course,” Tess said gently. She rose and 
spoke to the sharp-eyed woman behind the desk. 
The latter pursed her lips an instant, studied the 
black-clad Jim, and then nodded. Tess came back 
and took Jim by the hand. “Let’s go out where we 
can talk.” 

They walked out into the star-lit campus, down 
the white-graveled paths lined with shrubbery blos¬ 
soming with spring. He was going to New York, 
was the thought that went surging through her 
brain. 

“I’ve half a mind to pack my bag and go with 
you!” 


MANHANDLED 


65 

She broke their silence suddenly. He needed her 
now. And he was going to New York* the city 
of her dreams. 

"You couldn’t do that,” he protested. "Gee, Tess, 
you couldn’t, though the thought of it makes me 
almost crazy. But you’ll graduate here in a month.” 

"I know,” she sighed. "And I’ll go back to 
Marysville.” Then in sudden heat, "But I won’t be 
resigned to teaching school. I won’t! Some day 
soon I’ll join you. I’ll come to New York, too. 
And you must help me to convince Aunt Katherine, 
Jim.” 

They sat upon a rustice bench, over which the 
fragrance of lilac hung almost oppressively sweet, 
and argued over it for a crowded hour, without 
definite decision. He did not like the idea. He 
had the countryman’s prejudice against the metrop¬ 
olis. He was strong, he could survive. But the city 
would tarnish her. 

"I am strong too, Jim,” she cried, her bright 
eyes agleam and looking far beyond him. "I could 
make good, I know.” 

When he left her to hurry to his train, she reached 
up her arms and lips to his haggard face and kissed 
him, and her kiss was neither wholly sympathy nor 
wholly love. 


CHAPTER V 


T HE young kindergarten-teacher in the Marys¬ 
ville Public School sighed with mingled weari¬ 
ness and relief. She had seen those of her small 
charges whose guardians* called for them, at the 
close of the school-day, safely into piloting hands, 
with a pleasant smile from her rather tired eyes for 
each of the older people. She had started the un¬ 
chaperoned urchins of her flock auspiciously on their 
way with a word of warning about letting Pete the 
Policeman pilot them across Main Street. And now, 
having regained her desk, she sank into her squeaky 
swivel-chair with a second relieved sigh, and with 
deft little movements of her fingers pushed back 
from her damp forehead straying locks of her red¬ 
dish-brown bobbed head. 

The barnlike, but blithely decorated kindergarten- 
room was bathed in the June mid-afternoon sun, 
slanting in through the open windows, which seemed’ 
to be admitting phantasmal heat-waves rather than 
an actual breeze. Even the ivy clinging to the bricks 
was ominously still. It was very hot for June. 
66 


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67 


Tess had fought a valiant but a losing battle with 
the unknown New England architect guilty of that 
school-room, in her effort to brighten up a structure 
innately lugubrious. Its interior now resembled the 
remnants of a children’s party, given for a youngster 
of five, after the last guest had left. The long tables 
were littered with pieces of varicolored paper, as 
was also a large section of the floor. The low chairs 
were helter-skelter. Dust specks danced in the shafts 
of sunlight The children had been engaged in cut¬ 
ting paper dolls during the long, early summer after¬ 
noon, and the debris remained. 

Aside from the brightly-hued paper, the only 
other spots of color in the brown-stained room were 
the geranium boxes in the windows and the two 
deep red roses on Tess’s desk. 

She idly fingered the stem of one of the roses. 
Then, leaning back and rubbing her weary eyes with 
the heels of her hands, she sat upright again, sighed 
once more, and reached into a drawer of her desk 
for her report-book. Opening it, she dug into the 
ink-well with her pen and in a neatly pointed script 
started to fill out her monthly records. 

She was a little worried about her eyes. Another 
year of this, and she was quite sure she would be 
wearing glasses. That, she felt, would stand the 
first sign of her subjugation to her profession. 


68 


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Tess had taken the kindergarten-course at the 
normal school because she had imagined starting 
very small children aright upon the path of educa¬ 
tion would be more interesting than teaching 
their older and more intractable brothers. Aunt 
Katherine, from her own experience, had agreed 
with her and had assisted in securing for her the 
appointment to the vacancy in the kindergarten de¬ 
partment of the Marysville School. Miss McNair 
was naturally delighted to have her niece home with 
her again. The two years without her had not been 
without their aspects of desolation. Tess herself 
would have preferred an assignment in a larger, 
newer school somewhere else, but, largely because 
she secretly regarded her school-teaching as only a 
temporary occupation until she found her bearings, 
she had yielded. 

And life had settled into a quiet monotonous rou¬ 
tine which, with the end of the school-year only a 
month away, had been more and more getting on 
her nerves. The children were dear little things, to 
be sure. But they were helpless little things, as 
well, and very often troublesome in the extreme. 

Tess wondered if she was selfish in disliking her 
work, in desiring life for herself instead of burying 
herself in the task of preparing others for life, envy¬ 
ing Jim his struggle with the teeming roar that is 


MANHANDLED 


69 


New York. Though his letters at times spoke so 
discouragingly of the hardness and sordidness and 
false glamour of the city of her dreams, she longed 
to test it for herself. 

She poised her pen in mid-air and thought of him 
now. He was coming to her to-morrow for a fly¬ 
ing week-end visit, their first reunion since Christ¬ 
mas time. She sat faintly disturbed by the fact that 
she was not looking forward to his coming with 
keener pleasure. Jim was a small-town boy born 
and bred, she decided. City-life held no allure for 
him. Instead of regaling her with the accounts of 
the theaters and cabarets and operas that she longed 
to hear about, he was continually congratulating her 
upon being out of it all, seeking, apparently, to per¬ 
suade her how much more fortunate she was to be 
where roses bloomed and life ran quietly. 

Jim was a dear boy but— 

Her eyes were suddenly blinded by a pair of big 
warm hands closing over them from behind. She 
started with the unexpectedness of it. Then she 
smiled. She knew those strong calloused palms. 

“You’re early, Jim,” she laughed in delighted 
surprise. He had seen her from the open door, tip¬ 
toed in, and chosen that naive manner of greeting 
her. He dropped his hands to her shoulders, swung 
her bruskly around and, stooping, kissed her. 


70 


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“I had a chance to get away this morning, and 
you bet I took it,” he chuckled. His strong face 
was more serious and pale from his work indoors, 
but otherwise he was the same big, husky, safe Jim. 

He drew a chair to her desk, took the pen from 
her, and seized both of her hands, still inarticulately 
overjoyed to see her. 

“Golly, it was hot back there in New York,” he 
exuded 

“Not much better here,” she protested. 

“Not in this hot-house of a room, maybe. But 
aren’t you through for the day ? I went up to your 
aunt’s house from the station. But she said you 
were still here. Chuck it, can’t you, and let’s get 
out in the air.” 

“You’ll have me fired, Jim,” she bantered. But 
she closed her overgrown book and replaced it in the 
drawer. Then, looking very cool in her neat blue 
Jersey suit with the crisp white collar, in comparison 
with Jim’s train-worn clothes and train-gritted 
countenance, she stood up and announced, “O. K.” 

They conversed animatedly as they walked up 
shady Main Street, where it was comparatively cool. 
A block up the street they came upon the sound of 
busy hammers originating within a vacant lot, 
fenced off with crudely stretched white canvas. 
Several automobiles were parked at the curb near 


MANHANDLED 


7i 


the entrance in this cloth barrier, and perspiring 
men were unloading their miscellaneous contents 
and carrying them inside. A small-sized ferris- 
wheel towered up modestly from within the white. 
Shouts, rattling boards and a scene of confused ani¬ 
mation echoed out of them. 

“They’re holding the Firemen’s Carnival early 
this year,” Jim commented, and stopped to shake 
hands with a swarthy, dumpy little man weighted 
down by a canvas-covered contrivance that looked 
suspiciously like a roulette-wheel. Several other 
men recognized Jim and stopped, and soon he was 
holding a miniature reception. 

“Coming to the opening of the carnival to-night, 
ain’t you, folks?” inquired one. “Bigger an’ better 
than ever—dancin’ with a band from New London, 
games of skill and chance and everythin’.” 

“We’ll be there, John,” Tess laughed, with a quick 
consulting glance at Jim. “We’ll show this city 
fellow what a real good time is like.” 

Jim might have protested after dinner that he 
was tired and that he would much rather spend the 
evening with her alone, both of which objections 
would have been perfectly true. Refreshed some¬ 
what with the swim they had taken together, during 
which she proved to her secret delight that she could 
still duplicate all of Jim’s diving feats, and even give 


MANHANDLEDj 


72 

him a good tussle in a sprint, he sat smoking his 
pipe between the contented and silent Miss McNair 
and Tess for a grateful hour out on the broad 
veranda. A gentle breeze was stirring across the 
flower-scented lawn from the direction of the sound. 
A million stars blinked peacefully above. To Jim, 
fresh from the din of the dty, it was a scene of utter 
contentment, needing only the presence of his 
mother there to make it complete. He could not 
imagine why Tess should not be entirely satisfied. 

‘Todd Harlan and a party drove in to the Har¬ 
lans’ in an automobile while you were swimming,” 
announced Miss McNair. 

“He did?” Tess was interested at once. “I 
haven’t seen Todd for five years. What did he look 
like, Aunt Kit?” 

“I didn’t get a good look at him. But they were 
very lively. Three men in the car.” 

Tess looked over at the big Harlan house, un¬ 
usually aglow from cellar to roof with light. Mr. 
and Mrs. Harlan were getting quite old now and as 
a rule, did very little entertaining. Todd, she 
understood, had married one of his own class, a 
rich young society woman prominent in New York. 
He was in the Stock Exchange in Wall Street. 
Tess, remembering that, felt she would like to see 
him again. 


MANHANDLED 


73 


“Perhaps we’ll meet them at the carnival,” she ad¬ 
mitted aloud. Already the syncopation of “the band 
from New London” was coming clearly up to therm 
“You won’t mind if we go down for a while, will 
you. Aunt Kit? Come on, Jim, I’ll show you some 
real Marysville excitement!” 

If there was a tinge of sarcasm in her voice, 
mingled with recklessness, Jim did not notice it. 
She seized his hand, feigning to drag him from his 
chair with a mimic grimace of strained effort, and, 
laughing, he rose and made his adieu to Miss Mc¬ 
Nair. He seemed to be looking for something, and 
Tess cried, “Oh, you don’t need your hat here. 
You’re not in New York.” And they were off. 

All Marysville, and many of the neighboring 
towns, seemed to have congregated within the can- 
vased acre of flooding light that spelled the opening 
of the Firemen’s Carnival. Cars were parked the 
length of Main Street, on both sides, and more were 
coming. The band crashed out a merry din, and 
summery-clad couples swayed to the barbaric music 
on the wooden dance-platform. Crowds swarmed 
around the various booths, where games of chance 
for prizes flourished openly. A brightly polished 
sedan automobile, which was to be raffled off at the 
end of the carnival, was a center of attraction. 
Chattering, drinking “soft pop” and crunching pea- 


74 


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nuts, munching “hot dogs” and spending money in 
what for the country is a reckless manner, the 
crowds mulled around in high glee. 

The cares of the class-room seemed to slip from 
Tess’s slim shoulders with the purchase of her ad¬ 
mission ticket She succumbed immediately to the 
festival spirit of the hour. She knew the carnival 
was crude and elementary, but she longed to have a 
good time, and this was the best substitute at hand. 

“Oh, there’s Todd!” she cried, after they had 
been there about half an hour, and pointed over the 
intervening heads to a trio of men who were just 
entering. Wearing natty golf-suits and expensive 
sport-shirts and cravats of a shade hitherto' unknown 
in Marysville, it did not need the amused sophisti¬ 
cated look of their sleek-shaved faces to proclaim 
them of New York. At almost the same instant 
that Tess indicated him to Jim, Todd saw her. 
With an exclamation of pleasure Todd turned to his 
companions and said something to them. Then he 
led the way as quickly as possible through the crowd 
to Tess. 

“Todd, you know Jim Hogan, of course,” she 
said, frankly delighted. But in her pleasure at see¬ 
ing 1 Todd there was a small mixture of disappoint¬ 
ment at his appearance. He was not the smooth¬ 
muscled well-built Todd he had been when he first 


MANHANDLED 


75 


graduated from college. His face had fattened, 
even coarsened a little. There was the suspicion of 
a paunch beginning around his belt. One can not 
keep in continual training for four years and then 
abandon it for Wall Street, society dances, mid- 
night-to-morning cabarets, lobster and boot-leg 
liquor and expect to retain either the figure of an 
Adonis or the austerity of an anchorite. 

Todd introduced his friends, both New York men 
of about his own age. Bob Nesbitt was almost 
identical in build with Todd, except that he had a 
mop of unruly black, curly hair, and, as Jim later 
objected, “spoke in bunches.” The other man, 
Draper Brenon, was tall and rather sinister-looking. 
Rings of dissipation darkened his tired black eyes, 
set too close to his straight prominent nose, through 
which he talked with rather an air of supercilious¬ 
ness. When introduced to Tess, he held her hand 
and looked at her keenly, as a sportsman regards a 
blooded horse. He made her vaguely uneasy. 

“We’re over from New London,” Todd ex¬ 
plained. “I came up from town expecting to spend 
the week-end with friend wife, who’s at the Gris¬ 
wold. But I found she’d deserted me for a yacht¬ 
ing party. So I lured these two sad bachelors from 
the golf-links and dumped them into the car for a. 
jaunt over to see that old uncle of mine.” 


MANHANDLED 


76 

Tess wondered if she could be mistaken in seem¬ 
ing to detect a note of irritation in Todd’s pleasant 
voice as he spoke of his wife’s unexpected absence. 
And she was quite sure he had miscalled Draper 
Brenon a bachelor, for the account of the latter’s 
recent rather sensational divorce from his wife had 
reached even the Marysville paper. 

Todd inquired appropriately of Jim regarding 
his affairs. Jim seemed rather out of it in the face 
of this polished competition. And even more so 
when Todd turned to Tess and asked, “Well, Skip¬ 
per, do we dance ?” 

“We do,” she cried, glancing swiftly at Jim but 
hardly heeding his nod of confirmation. 

It seemed to Tess, as Todd swung her up to the 
low platform, that she had been longing all her life 
to dance. It was wonderful. The band was pour¬ 
ing a tingling, moaning fox-trot into the warm June 
air. Todd was an excellent dancer, and if he 
gripped her a little tightly, it was probably because 
he was used to New York cabarets where there 
isn’t much room. 

Tess returned to the others, after the dancers had 
encored the band nearly to exhaustion, flushed and 
delighted. 

Nesbitt and Brenon, carrying on a desultorily 
polite conversation with Jim, had been watching this 


MANHANDLED 


77 


strikingly pretty country girl and their friend closely 
during the dance. She was a regular pippin, they 
decided separately, wholly desirable. And she could 
dance like a sun-tanned dryad. 

“School-teaching hasn’t cramped your style, 
Skipper,” Todd laughed. Then turning with a 
slightly proprietorial air to the others, “Miss Mc¬ 
Guire and I are old pals. Fact is, we still hold the 
mixed doubles swimming-championship of Long 
Island Sound.” 

“That must have been before you won the mixed 
drinking championship of Longacre Square,” 
Brenon jibed, not altogether good-naturedly. 

And Todd’s smile was clouded with a sudden 
warning frown. 

When the music started again, they waited for 
Jim to ask for the next dance. But poor Jim was 
as footbound as ever. He longed for a pretext on 
which to take Tess away from them. But he was 
afraid she wouldn’t come, even if he found that 
pretext 

“Do we dance, Miss McGuire?” Nesbitt mimicked 
Todd. And they did. Not quite so evenly as in 
the first dance, and she wondered what some of the 
elderly watchers, whom she caught glimpses of as 
Nesbitt whirled her about, thought of the ultra¬ 
modern dips and other contortions he was subjecting 


78 


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her to. Marysville was very staid upon the sub¬ 
ject of dancing, she knew. But a reckless mood had 
taken possession of her. She was so tired of being 
prim and stodgy, and Todd and his friends, with 
their glib tongues and self-assured manners, seemed 
a part of that outer freer world to which she longed 
to migrate. 

Brenon, long and graceful as a professional, 
claimed his dance next. He pressed her close to 
him until her brown head rested nearly under his 
sharp chin, and they moved as one body to an in¬ 
sidiously physical fox-trot. She had never danced 
with any one half as expert as Brenon, or half as 
dangerous. Something was going to her head, like 
wine. Her cheeks were hot, and she was an instant 
recovering control of her tongue as the dance ended 
and they rejoined the other men. She did not want 
to look at Jim, knowing he must be disapproving. 
She tossed her head a little in bravado. She wanted 
to dance some more, to dance all night, always! 

“You’re a wonder, Skipper;” proclaimed Todd. 
And he meant it. “You’ve got any deb I ever 
trotted with skinned, and Draper here, who’s New 
York’s champion parlor-snake, is nuts on you, too. 
Am I right, Drape?” 

“Where have you been hiding her, Todd?” 
drawled Brenon. “I’ve a sneaking idea your uncle 


MANHANDLED 79 

wasn’t the only attraction that brought you to 
Marysville, eh?” 

He seemed to take pleasure in knowing this hurt 
Jim. 

Then they danced some more-—first Todd, then 
Nesbitt, and eventually Brenon with the light in his 
eyes she didn’t trust. And she could not realize 
that she had been keeping Jim standing there, a 
rather impatient wall-flower, for nearly two hours, 
when at last she came back to earth sufficiently to 
know that the time was midnight and they must go 
home. 

“Old-fashioned swimming party at noon to-mor¬ 
row,” were Todd’s last words as they left. 

Once more in the cool shadows of upper Main 
Street and away from the intoxication of the music, 
she turned to Jim, frankly apologetic. She was sur¬ 
prised that he seemed more disturbed at her actions 
for her own sake than for any slight that she might 
have offered him. 


CHAPTER VI 


HEY fewam off the Harlan pier on Sunday 



-L afternoon, blithely disregarding Miss Mc¬ 
Nair’s strict views on Sabbath athletics. Tess saw 
one of her idols crumbling at the base when Todd 
refused to imitate her double somersault dive. 

“I’m too ancient to risk my neck at that stunt 
any more, Skipper!” He sought to laugh it off, 
but he was quite serious. She had a queer feeling 
of time slipping away from her. She was only 
twenty. But wasn’t she getting on fearfully fast? 
Todd Harlan, too old to do double front flip, sleek- 
limbed Todd with the muscles of steel that used to 
ripple as he walked out to the end of the board 
But sleek-limbed Todd no longer, alas. Physically 
New York had not done so well with the swimming 
instructor and the idol of her youth. 

“Todd’s like all these star strong-boys when they 
slack off,” drawled Draper Brenon’s lazy voice at 
her side. He had settled down near where she was 
dangling her white legs over the side of the pier, 
and was languidly fishing a crumpled cigarette out 
of his sweater pocket Evening clothes would suit 
his tall, rather bumpy figure better than bathing 


80 


MANHANDLED 81 

trunks, she decided. He shot the match into the 
water and continued, “However, I’d rather lose my 
figure than bury myself in a town like this. Lord 
knows what a pippin like you can be doing tucked 
away up here in the woods.” 

She did not fancy the prolonging look he gave her 
out of his narrow dark eyes, nor did she like the 
rather contemptuous way he spoke of his host But 
his last words, oddly enough, were in line with her 
own secret thoughts. Why my she tucked away 
in the woods ? 

After a heavy New England dinner, she and Jim 
went sailing in her sporty little sloop. Lolling in 
the sun-drenched cockpit, with Jim at the rudder, 
she waved to Todd and his guests, who were putting 
on the Harlan’s clock golf-green. Then they were 
out in the clean blue waters of the sound. Even 
though a quartette of yachts rode, sparkling white 
and- graceful as birds, a half-mile away, and, nearer 
by, a trio of stubby barges were swashing down the 
channel behind a puffy and presumptuous tug, they 
were alone as completely as if lost in the Canadian 
wilds. 

“Do you like Todd and his friends, Jim?” she 
asked him, because she was really curious to know. 

“Harlan and Nesbitt are all right, I guess,” he 
answered. 


82 


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“You don’t think so much of Draper ?* She used 
Brenon’s first name, he noticed, and winced a little. 

“Well, I don’t know him well enough to say, of 
course, but that guy doesn’t seem to me to have 
honest eyes. And he’s too fresh. He’s the kind of 
fellow you see hanging around the New York caba¬ 
rets. Too much money, and nothing to do but 
spend it [The women fall for him, I guess, and he 
knows it. What they call on Broadway a ‘smooth 
worker.’ ” He seemed to be warming up to his sub¬ 
ject “That’s the trouble with New York and a 
girl, Tess. It’s a man’s city. Girls get along, but 
they’re dependent on men for almost everything, 
whether it’s business or pleasure. Brains in girls 
don’t go far on Broadway. Pretty faces go further, 
but New York men like Draper aren’t content very 
long to give much in return for just pretty faces, 
either. I don’t say it’s impossible for girls to stay 
clean there and win success. But where there’s so 
much dirt, the chances of getting soiled are pretty 
darned good!” 

She looked at him with wide eyes of interest 

“Do you think I could win success without being 
soiled?” she asked. 

His grave blue eyes locked with hers momentarily, 
as if he were inquiring whether she wanted the 
truth. He decided she did. 


MANHANDLED 


83 

"I honestly don’t know,” he surprised and hurt 
her by saying. ‘I’m mighty fond of you, and I 
know you’re pure gold at heart. When love is real, 
it isn’t blind, you know. It sees everything, but it 
skids past what it doesn’t want to see. You’re a 
man’s girl, Tess. There’s something about you that 
appeals to a thrill-hunter like Brenon, as well as it 
appeals to me. New York would give you the glad 
hand, all right. But you’re young and you’re hun¬ 
gry for a good time. So I’m wondering if New 
York wouldn’t go to your head, just as the jazz 
music did last night.” 

She wasn’t angry. 

“And would New York’s going to my head be 
worse than Marysville’s going to my head and kill¬ 
ing it of dry rot ?” 

“For me—yes. But I’m selfish, of course.” 

“I didn’t know you’d developed into such a phi¬ 
losopher, Jim,” she mused, gazing out over the water 
and seeing much farther than even the sun-flamed 
windows of Marysville lighthouse. Then, suddenly 
coming back to him, she said with conviction, “Just 
the same, I’m going to try your New York, Jim. 
Aunt Kit’s a dear and I’ll hate like the dickens to 
leave her. But I think Broadway will agree with 
me as well as Marysville does, anyway. You really 
don’t know what a scandalous creature I’ve de- 


MANHANDLED 


84 

veloped into, Jim. Ask some of the Puritan spins¬ 
ters, male and female, around here. I swim in a 
one-piece bathing suit, as you’ve seen. And though 
that’s the only sensible thing there is to swim in, 
John Lockwood, head of the school board, thinks it’s 
not at all the thing for a kindergarten-teacher. I 
chaperoned the high school straw-ride to Parksburg 
last month, and I let them get away with murder, 
the poor, pleasure-starved kids. And there was a 
fuss about that I danced every time the band 
played, including encores, at the high school dance— 
five* times with Scotty Trevor, who is our best 
Marysville imitation of Draper Brenon—and all the 
old folks had faces as long as a fiddle. And I 
smashed up Scotty’s Hup on the way home when he 
grabbed me while I was driving. So I’m a real wild 
woman here, Jim!” 

He did not like the sound of her reckless little 
laugh as she finished her bravado confession. 

“No, you’re not,” he said shortly. “You’re my 
girl.” 

Then he changed the subject, firmly but abruptly. 

Yet her eyes were meditative as she kissed him 
good-by at the station that night. And he started 
his long and tedious journey back to New York in 
a grimy day-coach, more disturbed in mind than he 
cared to admit. 


MANHANDLED 


85 

A week later the lank figure of John Lockwood, 
banker and monarch of Marysville county politics 
as well as schools, slouched into the kindergarten- 
room just after Tess had dismissed the children for 
the day and draped, his somber, seedy frame into the 
extra chair by her desk. Tess had a vague idea in 
advance of what was coming. 

“Afternoon, Miss McGuire,” he said, in a voice 
peculiarly high and shrill, and blinked small gray 
eyes behind his shiny goggles. “Everything looks 
nice and shipshape in here. Cool too.” His glasses 
circled the room deliberately. “Like the work, do 
you?” 

“I’m not complaining,” she answered politely- and 
not truthfully. 

He shifted in the chair. Used, in his bank, to 
dealing with petitioners and worried victims of 
mortgages, he took pleasure in making people un¬ 
easy and fancied Tess was writhing with suspense. 
She wasn’t. 

“Thought I would come around and inquire about 
next year,” he came to the point finally. “We 
usually sign the contracts with our school-teachers 
about now. You’ll be back with us, of course?” 

She hesitated. Now that the issue was put 
squarely up to her, she was uncertain. 

She was grateful that he forestalled her answer 


86 


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by hitching his chair nearer, clearing his throat and 
saying in a more subdued tone, not unalloyed with 
embarrassment: “Before we talk business, Miss 
McGuire, I guess I ought to tell you that there was 
some opposition in the school board to givin’ you 
another contract. Not that I ain’t perfectly satis¬ 
fied with you myself, mind you, and nobody could 
say that your work with the children wasn’t A-num- 
ber one. But some of the members brought up inci¬ 
dents tendin’ to show that a girl who’s got the re¬ 
sponsibility of bein’ an example to children ought to 
be more careful. Your dancin’ with Harlan and his 
high-flyers at the carnival last Saturday night 
seemed to bring things to a head. There’s been a 
lot of talk, and it was all thrashed out at the meetin’ 
of the board this afternoon.” 

Tess’s face, at first pink, was turning a deep red. 
Her chin was trembling beyond her control. She 
wasn’t going to cry. Rather the Celtic temper of 
Nora McGuire was kindling a young volcano of 
anger in her breast. But she let him go on. 

He sensed her feelings clumsily. He continued 
in a more conciliatory voice. 

“Spite of all that,” he salved her, “we’re willin’ 
to give you a contract for next year, knowin’ and re¬ 
spectin’ your aunt, Miss McNair, as we all do. 
And, I might add, a lot of folks have been on the 


MANHANDLED 


87 

point several times of speakin’ to her about you. 
As Isay, we’ll sign a new contract, which I’ve got in 
my pocket, providin’ you’ll agree in the future to be 
just a leetle more careful about how you act out of 
school hours. Folks talk freely in this town, you 
know, and we can’t have a scandal in our schools, 
’specially while I’m runnin’ them.” 

The face of Tess was a deep crimson. Her violet 
eyes were fairly snapping, and she rose unsteadily, 
gripping the edge of her desk with her fingers until 
the knuckles reddened. Though, erect, she came 
hardly to Banker Lockwood’s baggy chin, she 
loomed in front of him like a beautiful, avenging 
Amazon. He was frightened at the storm he had 
brewed in her face and body. 

Yet her voice was under control, quiet and biting. 
There was even a note of relief in it. The time had 
come, she realized, for her and Marysville to part. 
She snapped. “I rate this talk about me at what it’s 
worth—nothing. I didn’t know there were so many 
stupid and malicious people in the world. I’d al¬ 
ready decided not to come back here next year. You 
don’t want me in your school. You don’t need 
human flesh and blood. Offer your contract to some 
old maid over sixty, who has forgotten what it is to 
have human feelings. Then perhaps the doddering 
old Puritans on your board will approve.” 


88 


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Without another glance at him, she swept out of 
the room and down the corriodr to the teachers’ 
wardrobe. 

On her way up Main Street, her head high in the 
air like a bird who has found the cage-door open 
and scented freedom, she made her plans. 

Katherine McNair listened to her impassioned 
recital of the scene with calm wise eyes. 

“You are right not to consider going back, 
Theresa,” she decided in her, at fifty-five, small but 
clear and somewhat very comforting voice. She 
was practically the only person in the world who 
called her niece by her given name. “But have you 
considered what you are going to do ?” 

And Tess told her the plan, nurtured for over a 
year, and now perfected in its details during her 
walk home. 

Miss McNair, gallant old soldier that she was, 
and loving this vibrant young emotion-tom girl as 
she did, took it without a whimper. She did not 
offer an opinion at once. She spent a sleepless night 
upon it, while her niece in the next room lay equally 
awake, staring half fearfully into the shaft of June 
moonlight slanting across her bed. 

The elder lady recurred firmly and at once to the 
subject over the breakfast table. 

“You are your mother all over again, Tess,” she 



A Par-mount Picture. Manhandled . 

“ GIVE IT ALL UP AND MARRY ME,” JIM URGED. 











MANHANDLED 


89 


said tenderly. “I can see her in you more every 
day. You are twenty now, and you have a mind of 
your own. I'm confident you can take care of your¬ 
self anywhere. There's nothing in the world I 
would regret more than to see you leave here. But 
I can appreciate your feelings. Nora's were the 
same. And trying to change them and keep you 
here would be as wrong as it would be useless." 

Small twin tears shone in Katherine McNair’s 
wise old eyes, and Tess thought panickly what 
would happen if her aunt should break suddenly into 
weeping, whether all her plans would not volun¬ 
tarily be abandoned in the grief of her beloved bene¬ 
factor. But the old lady recovered and asked almost 
crisply, “Have you written Jim?" 

Jim's answer was characteristically to the point: 

“I can see you’re bound to try your luck. I'll be 
tickled to death to have you near me. There's a 
vacant room in the boarding-house where I'm 
stopping. Shall I engage it for you? It’s no palace, 
but it’s clean and reasonable in price. Write me 
what train you’re arriving on, and I'll meet you at 
Grand Central,” 


CHAPTER VII 


T HE restless murmur of voices in the vault¬ 
like side-rom of the Grand Central Term¬ 
inal was punctuated suddenly by the staccato rap¬ 
ping of an automatic stylograph against loose paper, 
and a hundred pairs of eyes were focussed eagerly 
upon the blackboard mounted above the high plat¬ 
form at one end of the room. A bored uniformed 
station attendant consulted the electrically produced 
writings and, slouching over to the blackboard, 
wrote, “New London Express. On Time. Track 
25 ” 

Jim Hogan, still breathless from hustling out of 
the Subway, but grateful that he had reached his 
train-level in time, took in this intelligence at a 
glance and hurried out to Track 25. Joining the 
throng that was already waiting behind the confin¬ 
ing ropes, he removed his straw hat and mopped his 
over-heated brow, then, like the others, watched 
eagerly the iron-grilled gate guarded by its two 
uniformed custodians. In five minutes there was a 
commotion on the other side of the glass-and-metal 
barrier, the guards clanged the gates open, and a 
crowd of men, women, suit-cases, children and red- 
90 


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91 


capped porters began pouring out. Jim pressed for¬ 
ward, scanning with darting glances, the vari-col- 
ored surge of humanity. At last he saw Tess. 

Trim as any Fifth Avenue limousined debutante, 
he proudly enough said to himself, at that first 
vision of her. A little blue cloche pressed tightly 
upon her dark bobbed head, the familiar violet eyes 
bright but confident in their setting of straight 
piquant nose and tanned cheeks, with the ruddy 
glow of outdoor health showing through, a riotously 
red Deauville scarf surmounting with careless grace 
the severely tailored blue suit that showed the slim, 
supple lines of her body, she caused many a head to 
be turned her way and to wonder who the lucky 
person was who was meeting her. Almost instantly 
she caught sight of Jim’s gesticulating hand, and he 
stepped under the ropes to her side with a wide 
smile of welcome. Her ripe lips met his in full 
view of the swollen August Saturday afternoon 
Grand Central crowd, and a score of envious males 
sighed almost audibly. 

She looked around with keen pleasure at the 
seething activity packing the great concrete-and- 
marble temple of transportation under its high blue 
dome and, as he took possession of her suit-case, 
exclaimed, “Oh, Jim, isn’t it marvelous to think I'm 
in New York at last!” 


92 


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"And with me!” added Jim—but she did not seem 
to hear him. 

He found speech less easy as he led the way 
through the onrushing cohorts, past the gay con¬ 
course shop-windows, down the thickly populated 
marble steps, and finally through the clacking gates 
to the hot subterranean depths of the Lexington 
Avenue Subway up-town platform. Perspiring 
human bodies pressed tightly around them, twenty 
deep, as inside the iron runway they waited for the 
express train. To Tess, it seemed both strangely 
new and strangely familiar. 

With a roar and a screech of iron against iron, 
the train lurched swiftly around the curve, a dirty 
greenish-black serpent in twelve segments, and 
slowed reluctantly to a stop in front of them. The 
car-doors rolled bumpily open at once. All except 
the one immediately before them. It lurched 
drunkily and stuck, half-closed. A grimy-faced 
guard in a streaked white uniform much too large 
for him, appeared from within the train, flung his 
pudgy form against the door’s rubber-padded edge, 
and, with a snarl at the passengers who were try¬ 
ing to squeeze out past him, forced it violently open. 

"Let ’em off, pleez! Watch yer step! Let ’em 
off, pleez! Watch yer step!” bellowed the fat gray- 


MANHANDLED 


93 

clad platform men in their great brute-voices, bar¬ 
riers* between the coming and going mobs. 

The last passenger out, the giant Cerberuses 
stepped aside, and, as if released and propelled for¬ 
ward’ by one spring, the entering hordes flung them¬ 
selves at the yawning doors as if their lives de¬ 
pended upon being* first over the threshold. Tess’s 
hat was knocked askew, her new suede shoes were 
bruised by a score of clambering heels, she was 
bumped and jostled till she was sure she would have 
been flung to the concrete floor and trampled to 
suffocation, had not Jim thrust his strong right arm 
around her waist and steered her through the rush¬ 
ing tide. Luckily they were on the crest of the 
human surf. Once inside, the wave broke, and its 
parts went scampering for the few available seats, 
like rats for their holes. Jim did not release her 
until he had dropped her upon a narrow but empty 
section of the dirty wicker, secured by the simple 
strategy of imposing his big body between the rest 
of New York and the treasured space, and daring all 
and sundry to knock him away. 

With a mammoth jerk that sent Tess lurching 
against the fat shoulder of the garlic-fragrant, 
paint-splotched laborer beside her, the train resumed 
its merry way. On it rushed, clanging, screaming 


94 


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and swaying through the black dungeon, studded 
regularly with lights that blinked red, green and 
yellow like mocking eyes. Swaying on his metallic 
strap, showing black where the white enamel was 
chipped off, Jim shouted down reassuring words 
above the pandemonium. Tess felt an ache in her 
throat from her efforts to reply to the small per¬ 
centage of his attempted conversation that she could 
hear, striving courageously but with little success, 
between-whiles, to repair her disheveled attire. 

“Whew!” she breathed as, having disembarked at 
Eighty-sixth Street, they emerged from the steel 
Avernus and regained the inhabitable level of the 
sidewalk. She sniffed the outside air gratefully, 
hot as it was. 

“That was terrible,” she admitted, still bewildered 
and still a trifle depressed. 

“Oh, that’s the first thing you’ll have to get used 
to,” Jim grimly remarked. “You’ll learn to battle 
with the rest of them, after a while. You’ve got to 
admit it delivers you there quick.” 

“So does a smashed airplane—but how ?” 

“It’s no worse than the other things in this town. 
It’s the curse of New York that everybody always 
wants to do the same things at the same times. You 
live in a jam.” 

But nothing could utterly dismay her that day. 


MANHANDLED 95 

She was in the city of promise, at last, fault-packed 
as it might be. 

They walked a few blocks to the South, down a 
noisy thoroughfare littered with trolleys, dirty noisy 
children and little squalid shops, then east another 
few blocks lined with drab brownstone houses look¬ 
ing exactly alike and as if they had all seen much 
better days. The front steps, for the most part 
chipped and split, leading to the dark-looking vesti¬ 
bules, contained numerous hot and drooping speci¬ 
mens of humanity seeking gossip and a late after¬ 
noon breath of air with housemates and neighbors. 

It looked hopelessly sordid to Tess, far different 
than she had imagined. But she consoled herself 
with the thought that a fabulous Gay White Way 
and a resplendent Fifth Avenue were somewhere 
around the next corner. Even if she had to live for 
a while in this mess, there would be many compensa¬ 
tions. And perhaps Jim’s boarding-house was of a 
better grade than these sullen-faced homes that had 
fallen upon evil days. 

But when Jim said, “Here we are,” she looked 
up to find that the rooming-house maintained by 
Mrs. Julia Binner stood quite as unalluring, to all 
outward appearances, as the rest of the neighbor¬ 
hood. , The dirty brown steps had smooth hollows 
in their center from the tread of two generations, 


MANHANDLED 


96 

and on one side the iron railing, with its self-de¬ 
fective ornamental notches serrating the top, was 
broken and twisted. Nevertheless Tess tripped 
blithely up the stones beside Jim and her suit-case 
and waited eagerly while he adjusted his key in the 
lock of the door with its glass panels covered with a 
frayed rectangle of ill-chosen and somewhat soiled 
lace curtain. 

Inside, the gloom was partly explained by the 
dark red paper that covered the walls. Directly 
ahead of them loomed a long flight of stairs, covered 
with well-worn carpet that nearly matched the walls, 
and to the right of the narrow hall a wide brown- 
portiered entrance led to the parlor, the community 
rest-room for the convenience of lodgers and their 
callers. The shutters in this room had been drawn 
against the heat of the day, but in the poor light 
Tess’s circling eyes could glimpse the uninviting 
furnishings—innumerable chairs, all looking quite 
uncomfortable, a spindly center-table littered with 
frayed magazines and a fish-bowl filled with brack¬ 
ish green water and occasional flashes of red. A 
pianola leaned slightly forward under its top-heavy 
weight of piled-high music-rolls in their boxes, and 
a battered oaken victrola with its lid up and the 
needle digging into a half-played record looked odd¬ 
ly like an open mouth ready to bite at the unwary. 


MANHANDLED 


97 


“Mrs. Binner! Oh, Mrs. Binner!” Jim was 
shouting up the steps, wondering if he shouldn’t 
have rung the bell before entering, since he had a 
stranger of the opposite sex with him. 

In a few minutes the! noise of a heavy and slow- 
moving object getting slowly under way sounded 
from the regions above, and soon Mrs. Binner came 
grunting down the stairs. Tess always hated to see 
big women simper, and the landlady was of ample 
proportions and of quite evident Germanic origin, 
with florid face, a small hard mouth and a dishonest 
smile, and she undeniably simpered when Jim intro¬ 
duced her to Tess. 

“This is the young lady you told me about, ain’t 
it, Mr. Hogan?” she inquired. “Come right this 
way, Miss—McGuire. I got a lovely front room 
for you right on the floor under Mr. Hogan.” And 
she led the way up the long traverse of dull red steps 
again, Tess following and Jim and the suit-case 
bringing up the rear. 

An hour later, when Jim stopped by for her, Tess 
had unpacked her bag and stowed its contents away 
in the child-sized closet and the plain bird’s-eye- 
maple bureau, had salvaged her face, hands, hair 
and clothes from the ravages wrought by the heat 
and dust, and was sitting on the hard brass bed sur¬ 
veying her kingdom and trying not to be discour- 


MANHANDLED 


98 

aged. It was so different from her neat and roomy 
chintz-curtained bedroom that overlooked the 
sparkling waters of the sound. True, it had the ad¬ 
vantage of being in the front of the house, though 
there was little of interest save light and air in the 
street below, and Tess knew, from the price quoted 
her by the landlady, that she could not keep even 
these unattractive quarters for long if she did not 
quickly land a job. 

“Well, what do you think of it?” smiled Jim, 
leaning against her door-jamb. 

“Not bad,” she smiled bravely back. “Not bad 
at all.” At the same instant she almost leaped from 
the bed in alarm as the ear-splitting clangor of a 
dinner-bell rang out seemingly right under her feet. 

Jim laughed. 

“That’s just Katie’s playful way of announcing 
supper,” he explained, and, motioning Tess out into 
the hall, instructed her to lean over the railing, 
where she spied a lean, slatternly creature fanning 
the air with a huge dinner-bell as if her life de¬ 
pended on getting the largest possible volume of 
sound out of it. It was not long before the stairs 
were creaking with other signs of life. Mrs. Bin- 
ner’s boarders were approaching their evening meal. 

Mustered at their places around the long table in 
the stuffy dining-room, with its absurdly colored 


MANHANDLED 


99 


center chandelier casting uncertain light over feast 
and feasters, they were a diverse and somewhat be¬ 
draggled crew. A place had been reserved for the 
recent recruit, beside Jim, and he introduced her as 
briefly as possible to her platemates as “Miss Mc¬ 
Guire, from my home town.” 

The pale watery-eyed Katie was balancing hot 
dishes perilously over their heads, and soon the as¬ 
semblage was hard at work, with all mufflers wide 
open. 

Tess, always a fastidious eater, was particularly 
fascinated by the manner in which the human engine 
of food-destruction on her left operated. In a few 
swift strokes of the knife and fork he had caused 
a mountain of potatoes and a fair-sized veal chop 
to vanish down his ample mouth, and now was look¬ 
ing around apparently for new dishes to conquer. 
His meandering eyes met Tess’s. Jim had intro¬ 
duced him as Sam Walters, she remembered, and 
Walters had added for some mysterious reason, 
“Of Walters and Ward.” He wore a very loud 
shirt, white, striped with broad purple, with stiff 
linen collar to match, and flamboyant purple cravat 
stabbed with a pin mounting a diamond so large that 
Tess knew it couldn’t possibly be genuine. His 
sparse black hair was oiled and sleeked close to his 
forehead, and his smooth-shaven, middle-aged and 


IOO 


MANHANDLED 


mottled face showed deep lines, denoting late hours 
and unhealthy food. 

“Ever been on the stage. Miss McGuire ?” he now 
asked her in a brisk nasal voice. 

“No,” she answered. “Why do you ask?” 

“Natural question to ask a pretty girl like you. 
Stage is my business. Walters and Ward—Komedy 
with a Kick. We got a great act. Ever see it? 
No? Played the Palace four months ago. Play¬ 
ing Mack time now, but expect to get back on the 
Orpheum Circuit in the fall. Logical place for a 
big-time act like—What’s your line?” 

“Why, I haven’t any line just at present. I have 
thought of going on the stage.” 

“Tough times in the profession right now. When 
an act like ours is doing split-time at a dump like 
the Galaxy, you can bet it’s hard pickin’s for every¬ 
body. And there’s lots of good acts layin’ off alto¬ 
gether. Got any prospects?” 

“No,” she admitted. 

“Well, say, me and you ought to get together. 
Maybe I can put you wise to somethin’. Meantime 
I got to beat it up to the theater. Goin’ to spring a 
new song number on ’em to-night and have to re¬ 
hearse it with the orchestra leader.” He turned his 
head swiftly around and bawled, “Katie, rassle that 
pie up here quick like a good kid, will you, I got to 


MANHANDLED 


IOI 


beat it.” And defying acute indigestion, he bolted 
his pie, flung down his napkin and with a breezy 
“See you later,” to Tess, made for his hat and the 
outer door. 

“Isn’t he funny?” she commented to Jim. 

“Not for a vaudeville actor,” he answered, and 
then colored a little, remembering Tess’s father. 
And he frowned a little, remembering a thought that 
was troubling him. 

When they were sitting side by side on the lumpy 
divan in the parlor, he asked, “You aren’t really 
serious about going on the stage, are you, Tess?” 

“I’ve got to do something, Jim,” she said, sur¬ 
prised at his rather deprecating tone. “And I’m not 
ashamed of being able to act, if I had the chance. 
I guess it’s in my blood. I want to try to do some¬ 
thing with my art work, too. Maybe Mr. Walters 
really could help me.” 

“Oh, he’s just a bunch of noise. Nobody here 
pays any attention to him.” 

“But I must get something as a starter. Couldn’t 
he at least give me the names of some of the man¬ 
agers?” She saw the cloud on Jim’s wide face, and 
forced a laugh. “But don’t let’s talk about me any 
more. .Talk about you. Tell me about your job. 
And that terribly complicated carburetor or some¬ 
thing like that you were working on.” 


102 


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Slowly the cloud disappeared. 

“Well, this is the first chance I've had to spill the 
beans. I take a new job Monday. That’s why I 
came to get off this afternoon to meet you. I begin 
as foreman of the machine-shop at the Polar Star 
Garage, down on Fifty-seventh Street. I’m to get 
more money and it’s a much larger shop than the 
one I was in. And the boss promised me the use of 
the machines and tools in my off-time, to work on 
my carburetor. He doesn’t believe in it—but he’s 
humoring me. You may think I’m nutty, too, Tess, 
but I really believe I’ve got something big in this 
carburetor. If it does what I think it’ll do, I can 
cut down the gasoline consumption on a standard 
car about twenty-five per cent. Any of the big ac¬ 
cessories companies would grab a thing like that in a 
minute and pay real money for it. I’ve already 
written out to the Detroit Accessories people, the 
largest in the business, describing what I’ve got. 
They wrote back the other day asking for more de¬ 
tails and suggesting I install the carburetor in my 
own machine, make a road-test, and get a report out 
to them.” 

“Oh, Jim!” said the girl at his side, not sharing in 
his smile. 

“ ‘My own machine’ is good,” continued Jim. 
“What I’ve got to do now is get permission to stick 


MANHANDLED 


103 

my carburetor into somebody else’s car and see what 
she’ll do. I’ve been working day and night on this 
darned thing. You ought to see my room. It looks 
like a machine-shop. Mrs. Binner has a fit about it 
regularly once a week.” 

^Jbn, will you be rich if this carburetor actually 
is any good?” she solemnly asked him, thrilled a 
little that her own quiet, hard-working Jim should 
have stumbled on any such promise of wealth. 

“You can bet I’ll get all it’s worth,” averred the 
young inventor. “We’ll get married the day after 
I sign the contracts.” And he added softly, “Won’t 
we?” 

She nodded only half-affirmatively. She wasn’t 
so sure. She was in New York to make good for 
herself also, and she couldn’t help secretly hoping 
that Jim’s carburetor-dream wouldn’t come true 
until hers had had a chance. 

“How about celebrating my new job by going to 
the movies ?” he invited. 

So they arrived at the Eighty-sixth Street Theater 
in time for the second show and brazenly held hands 
in the dark of the packed theater, like grammar- 
school children. 

Somebody was laboriously picking a one-fingered 
tune out on the parlor-piano at Mrs. Binner’s when 
they returned. The little, semi-bald man hunched 


104 


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over the tuneless keys swung around squeakily on 
the stool as he heard intruders. It was Sam 
Walters. 

“Say,” he accosted them in his usual brisk nasal 
tones about three times louder than necessary, “I 
been thinking about you, Miss McGuire. Any par¬ 
ticular line of stage work you were thinking of 
breaking into?” 

“I’d prefer straight drama,” was the slightly re¬ 
tarded but unmistakably solemn reply. 

“Legit, hey. Well then, Hertz is the man for 
you to see—Lou Hertz, Longacre Building, Broad¬ 
way and Forty-second. Happen to know he’s cast¬ 
ing a show right now, one of them foreign spec¬ 
tacular things he bought in Europe this spring. 
There ought to be a lot o’ ‘dumb parts’ in it—you 
know-just say a line or two and otherwise stand 
around and look interested. Don’t take experience 
to do that. He’ll probably fall for your looks and 
take a chance on you’re getting away with it Like 
to go see him?” 

“I’m awfully anxious to get started,” hesitatingly 
conceded the solemn-eyed girl. 

“O. K. Here’s my card.” He drew forth an 
over-sized oblong of paste-board from his waistcoat 
pocket and presented it to her with a flourish. 
“Worked in a musical show for Hertz once. He 


MANHANDLED 


105 


thought my work was great, but the show was a flop. 
Only lasted three weeks on Broadway to rotten busi¬ 
ness. Ruined a whole three months' solid bookings 
for me and my partner too. ‘Nix/ says I after 
that, ‘no more production work for me. I’ll stick 
to the old two-a-day, where you know where you’re 
at and where real talent is appreciated/ Say, what 
do you folks think of this little number?’* 

He swung around to face the keyboard and put 
his finger to work thumping out his ditty, accom¬ 
panying the thin music with an equally thin tenor 
voice. Before he had finished and they had as¬ 
suaged him with their preoccupied approval, Tess, 
tired out by the most strenuous day in her life, was 
nearly asleep on Jim’s shoulder. 


CHAPTER VIII 


“TV JT R- Hertz ain’t in yet. Expected any min- 

-LVX ute,” recited the callow office boy, who was 
yet to have his first shave. He turned away from 
the luminous violet eyes and resumed his throne 
back of the railing that separated the waiting wistful 
from the sacred domain of three leaded glass-doors, 
bearing, from left to right, the legends: Louis A. 
Hertz, Jr., Louis A. Hertz, and A. L. Hermann. 

“May I wait?” asked Tess, fresh from her first 
single-handed bout with the Grand Central-Times 
Square Shuttle, and rather welcoming a chance to 
sit down. 

“Sure, help yourself.” The young custodian of 
the portals waved a dirty hand insolently toward 
the chairs outside the railing. 

It was as she turned that Tess discovered the 
other two girls. The dark, willowy, over-rouged 
one in the corner looked so cold and unfriendly 
that Tess instinctively drifted over to the chair near 
the warmer marceled blonde. The latter’s plump, 
good-natured face, contorted a little by the gum she 
was so industriously chewing, relaxed into a smile 
of welcome as Tess sat down. 

106 


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107 

“Hot, ain’t it, dearie?” she opened in a metallic 
voice. Then she continued, “Huntin’ a job?” 

Tess admitted it. 

“Well, there ain’t much chance here, I guess. 
Hertz is all filled up, I hear.” She sighed a deep 
sigh that seemed to ripple all down her plump frame, 
its contours generously displayed in the flimsy, sum¬ 
mery dress she was wearing. “This is about my 
last stop too. The show business is sure rotten 
this summer. Would you believe it, I been huntin’ 
for three weeks now, and not a nibble? I had a 
chance last week to play in stock in Harrisburg, 
but you know, dearie, there ain’t nothin’ in that 
You had any luck?” 

Tess thought she might as well admit her shock¬ 
ing newness. 

“This is the first place I’ve tried,” she sparred. 

The blonde woman shot her an appraising, not 
unsympathetic glance. “You ain’t never been on 
the stage, have you, dearie?” 

Tess admitted it. 

“From the sticks?” 

Tess guessed she meant the country and admitted 
that too. 

“D’ you have to work for a living, or have you 
got jack o’ your own?” When she observed Tess 
raising her eyebrows as if to question the propriety 


io8 


MANHANDLED 


of that over-personal remark, the blonde promptly 
explained, “What I mean is, d’you really need a 
job? Because I’ve got a hunch we ain't neither 
of us goin’ to get one here." She shifted her chair 
nearer to Tess and, with a quick glance at the 
plastic brunette beauty in the comer, continued, “I 
like your looks, dearie, and I’ll tip you off to 
somethin'. Holton and Clark, down at Fifth and 
Twenty-fourth, are takin' on clothes-models. The 
work ain’t very hard, and the pay is good. I tried 
there yesterday myself, but they turned me down. 
Said I was too plump, the dirty bums. But I’m 
pretty sure they’d take a nifty looker like you, and 
Gawd knows, you ain't overweight." 

Tess thanked her and sat upright, at attention, 
as did the other two job-seekers, when the door 
swung brisky open and a little dark dapper man of 
about thirty-five, with gray spats and black malacca 
cane, twinkled across the miniature reception-room, 
through the gate in the railing and through the 
door room captioned Louis A. Hertz, Jr. 

A few minutes later a buzzer snarled, and the 
office-boy announced to the tall brunette in a sur¬ 
prisingly civil voice, “Mr. Hertz will see you now." 

“What I was goin' to say," resumed Tess's 
•friend, with an amused look at their rival as she 
swept haughtily past them* “what I was goin* to 


MANHANDLED 


109 


say, dearie, is if you need work right away, why 
not try Holton and Clark? Personally I ain’t 
worry in’. I got a friend in Thomdykes, the swell 
Fifth Avenue department store, who can always 
land me there if I need to. It’s only waitin’ on 
the counter, you know, but it’s better than nothin’. 
If I get stuck, me for Thomdyke’s. You might 
remember that, too. Ask for Mr. Moysey, head of 
basement, and say Pinkie Doran sent you. That’s 
me—Pinkie Doran. What’s your name, dearie?” 

Tess told her. 

“Irish like me, hey. Well, I can see, dearie, that 
you and me are goin’ to be cell-mates some day!” 

A cool drawl sounded just above their heads. 
Hie stately brunette had reappeared from the 
promised land and was announcing languidly, “You 
girls might as well beat it. Nothing doin’, Hertz 
says.” And she swept majestically out of the door, 
as if utterly bored with the whole wretched busi¬ 
ness. 

It was Pinkie Doran’s turn next, and she came 
out in three minutes with the same verdict. 

“Turned me down flat as a pancake in Child’s. 
You goin’ to wait, Tess?” 

“I might as well, I suppose.” She was de¬ 
termined to keep her courage up. Mr. Hertz must 
see that she was different from those other girls, 


no 


MANHANDLED 


though she already had a tepid spot in her heart 
^for Pinkie Doran. 

“Suit yourself. But don’t you forget Holton and 
Clark’s, and Thorndyke. Moysey is the name. 
Well, so long. I got a hunch I’ll see you again 
some time.” 

When, a moment later, Tess was sitting beside the 
glass-topped desk of the little fashion-plate Hertz, 
she was sure he was repeating the identical words 
to her that he had to the others. 

“Sorry, Miss—er—McGuire,” while his beady 
black eyes searched her body as a bookmaker sizes 
up a blooded stallion, “but there’s really nothing 
we can offer you here—not a thing.” The freshly 
manicured finger-tips of his left hand touched those 
of his right lightly over his slightly adipose but 
sleekly tailored stomach. He glanced down at Sam 
Walters’ card desecrating the nudity of his glass- 
topped desk. 

Hertz grinned and asked, in his clipped polite tone, 
“Who in the hell is Sam Walters ?” Without paus¬ 
ing for her answer, he went on, still appraising her 
fresh young beauty, “But you look like you might 
get along, kid. If we were doing any musical stuff, 
I’d stick you in the chorus in a minute. How about 
the movies? Ever try them? No? They’re about 
the only thing keeping the actors from starving to 


MANHANDLED 


hi 


death this summer. Suppose I give you a letter 
to Lou Gude, over at the Filmart Studio, in Astoria? 
He's the casting director, and a very good boy. 
What d’ you say?” 

She wondered if it were just an accident that 
resulted in his hand dropping over hers gently, 
where it rested on the edge of his desk. Certainly 
he hadn’t been looking at her hand. Well, what 
was the harm? He was in a position to do her a 
favor perhaps. She allowed her hand to rest under 
his a moment, then, with a little innocent-wise flash 
of her violet eyes toward him, gently withdrew it. 

“It would be very nice of you to give me a letter,” 
she said demurely. He pushed one of the row of 
buttons on his desk, and a stenographer bustled in. 
When the latter had inscribed her hen’s tracks in 
her book, and left, Hertz did not ask Tess to wait 
outside for her letter. He gave her his time, and 
space in his private office, in order to drink in her 
unspoiled loveliness, and manuever for the sensa¬ 
tion of again pressing that elusive and very smooth 
little hand, all under the pretext of offering her 
fatherly advice about breaking into motion pictures. 

“Don’t forget to call me up and tell me how you 
make out,” he admonished, when he had signed 
and delivered the letter to her. “We can talk it 
over at lunch at the Knickerbocker Grill.” He had 


112 


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long ago made it a rule never to trifle with the girls 
who came to him for jobs. It put him under obli¬ 
gations. It was bad business. But here was a 
brand-new type. Not the usual bold and blatant 
Broadway show-girl, ready to snatch the gold out 
of your teeth if you gave her as much as a smile. 
She was— 

But by that time she had said, ‘Til let you know 
if I land,” smiled, and was gone. 

But when, after a half-hour ride into the unknown 
wastes across the East River, she came to Filmart’s 
low, rambling concrete cross between a temple and 
a factory of the silent drama and had at last been 
ushered into the presence of Mr. Louis Gude, that 
hot and harassed young man told her shortly and 
succinctly that they were shutting up shop “lock, 
stock and barrel” on Saturday for two months and 
that the Prince of Wales himself could not get an 
“extra’s” role in a picture even if he were to guar¬ 
antee to appear for nothing. 

After a week of disappointment, concealed 
valiantly from Jim by a careful mask, Tess arrived 
via five other theatrical offices, two other movie 
studios and three “Help Wanted” ads in the Times, 
which she answered but never heard from, at the 
employment office of Holton and Clark, Ladies’ and 
Misses’ Gowns. There, to her utter amazement and 


MANHANDLED 


“3 

delight, she was hired in three minutes as a model 
by a sharp-faced, red-haired coatless man, who wore 
purple sleeve-garters and juggled half of a cold, 
half-consumed cigar in his mouth as he talked. 

She told Jim triumphantly about it that night and 
he said rather doubtfully, “Do you think you’ll like 
that kind of work?” 

“I don’t know enough about it to say. I won’t 
stick at it permanently, of course. But it’s as good 
as anything temporarily. I’ll be wearing lovely 
clothes, even though they’re not mine, and perhaps 
I’ll be able to get some pretty things at a discount.” 

“I’ve heard some queer things about this cloak- 
model game. However—” He shrugged his 
shoulders. What was the use of discouraging her 
with obstacles that were perhaps chimeras? 

Tess’s first week at Holton and Gark’s passed 
without incident. The work was tiring, and the 
exhilaration of wearing Parisian creations for a 
living wore off quickly under the ordeal of being 
forced to stand interminably in them while loud- 
voiced buyers haggled over price, style and fabric 
with equally loud-voiced sellers. Nor did she enjoy 
the manhandling which the bolder of the would-be 
purchasers subjected her to, under the pretext of a 
closer inspection of the attire she was parading. 

On Tuesday of the second week, a fat little Mr. 


MANHANDLED 


114 

Roth of Duluth attempted to follow her into the 
dressing-room and emitted a sharp squeal of pain 
as she slammed the door smartly in his face. She 
was not frightened, just decently angry in a calm 
way. 

The following day, another customer invited her 
to lunch, and she refused. In the afternoon he in¬ 
vited her to dinner and a show, and she refused 
rather more emphatically. The next day, Arnold 
Holton himself called her into his private office and 
said, “I’ve rather a serious report on you, Miss 
McGuire. I’m told you insulted one of our best 
customers, Emil Grossman, of Grossman and Katz.” 

She stared at him. “Insulted him?” she asked 
blankly. 

“Well, you read him the riot act when he invited 
you out to lunch and almost blew his head off 
when he mentioned dinner, didn’t you?” 

“I refused his invitations, if that’s what you 
mean. I’m not accustomed to lunching with men 
I don’t know, and who do not appeal to me.” 

Tess’s Irish was slowly rising. 

Holton, a natural-bom brow-beater, regarded her 
with a bullying eye. 

“Miss McGuire, it’s the custom here for models 
to accommodate the wishes of our customers, if it’s 
consistent with propriety. That’s only reason and 


MANHANDLED 


1I S 

good business. And it strikes me it was quite con¬ 
sistent in this case/’ 

A vision of the leering, thick-necked Grossman 
flashed into Tess’s brain. She flushed angrily. 

Very well,” she snapped, “if that’s your policy, 
it isn’t mine, and I resign and eat where I want to!” 


CHAPTER IX 

T HE girl stopped at the corner of Fifth! Avenue 
and Thirty-fourth Street She stopped short, 
with a look of wonder in her stippled violet eyes 
as she stared up the long 1 slope of Murray Hill. 

She saw an asphalted valley as clean as a gnawed 
bone, a valley threaded by twin lines of motor-cars 
that flashed in the morning sun, a valley treed with 
fragile bronze towers that winked with mysteriously 
tinted lights. Then she became conscious, for the 
first time, of the cliff-dweller windows along the 
walls of that valley, the banks and banks of windows 
that turned a stone-gray canyon into a competitive 
riot of color, that gave it depth and meaning and 
left it as expositional as a bazaar under glass. Those 
windows, from the challenging gold letterings about 
them and above them to the assertive gay wall-signs 
and roof-signs beyond them, even on to the occa¬ 
sional proclaiming pennon above the serrated line 
of the shop-tops, in some way suggested combat to 
her. It was a cry for attention, a tendering of 
service, a solemn battle to survive out of the crush 
and welter of city life. 

And it seemed fitting enough, as she lifted her 
116 


MANHANDLED 


ii 7 

gaze still higher, that she should catch sight of the 
drifting gray script of a, sky-writer as his wheeling 
plane left its smoke-trail across the appropriated 
blue arch of the heavens. For this, she remem¬ 
bered, was the core of New York. And New 
York, she had been told from her childhood, was 
the center of the world, the Mecca unto which 
youth fared to try its fortune, to hate its tumult 
as one failed in that test, and to love it as one suc¬ 
ceeded. 

It both thrilled her and frightened her a little. 
She liked the color and glamour and movement of 
that great estuary of trade at the same time that 
the immensity of the vista between the towering 
gray facades left her vaguely conscious of her own 
littleness. She felt poignantly alone in that city 
which had taken no thought of her existence, which 
had so indifferently turned away from her approach. 
But she had no intention of giving up. She still 
intended to fight for her place in the sun. And she 
had one chance left, she remembered as she con¬ 
sulted the slip on which the address of the Thorn- 
dyke store was written. 

She stepped out from the curb, with that impulse 
toward action still warm in her young body. She 
disregarded, in her hurry, the first line of cars that 
shuttled past her. Then she stopped, in a momen- 


MANHANDLED 


ri8 

tary panic, before the second line bearing* down on 
her. And as she hesitated, she caught sight of the 
huge traffic-officer at the street-center. 

She was not conscious of calling out to him. But 
he must have either heard or seen her, for with an 
imperious lift of his white-gloved hand he brought 
the charging avalanche to a halt. 

She had not intended to fling herself into his 
arms, but safety, she knew, lay in the shadow of 
that sheltering blue figure. And the officer smiled 
down at her, approvingly, as he drew her into neu¬ 
tral territory and motioned for the arrested tide to 
take up its way. 

“Yuh got ’o step careful, in a town like this,” 
he admonished as they waited for the flurry of 
wheeled things to sweep past. 

“I know,” she admitted as she crowded close to 
him. “But I took a chance.” 

“Don’t take ’em, girlie, don’t take ’em,” was his 
friendly advice, as he piloted her across the polished 
black pavement to the curb, where she was con¬ 
scious of his handclasp on her arm as he added: 
“Let ’em kill the homely ones!” 

She rewarded him with a smile of silent grati¬ 
tude that sent him humming back to his mid-road 
duties. And as she glanced about at him, for a 


MANHANDLED 


119 

moment, she was tempted to accept him as a sign 
and an augury. There was always someone, if 
you were honest and open, who would come to your 
help. And there was something about' men, even 
city men, that made them considerate with you if 
you were considerate with them. 

Her heart lightened, as though that blue-clad 
arm were still sustaining her, as she turned into the 
side-street and made her way toward the Thorn- 
dyke store. But her spirits sank again as she in¬ 
vaded the intimidating emporium of trade. It made 
a difference, she remembered as she repeated her 
politely-worded inquiries as to where she could find 
the Employment Manager, for she thought it politic 
to ask for him first instead of for Pinkie Doran’s 
Mr. Moysey, whether you had something to buy 
or something to sell. Yet she was relieved, after 
being ushered into the gray-toned office on the fifth 
floor, to find no bearded lion in its den, but a sad¬ 
eyed and slightly obese man of middle-age with a 
gardenia in his button-hole and very little hair on 
his head. He sat checking a column of figures at 
a mahogany desk flanked by a mahogany railing. 
He even betrayed neither surprise nor hostility when 
she hesitatingly explained that she had been sent 
there to apply for work. He merely motioned her 


120 


MANHANDLED 


into a chair and reached to a pigeon-hole filled with 
blue-tinted papers. One of these he handed to her 
before returning to his figures. 

It was her little gasp of despair that made him 
look up from his column. 

“I don’t quite know how to do this/* she com¬ 
plained as she met his abstractedly inquiring eye. 
Yet that eye softened a trifle, she noticed, at the 
appeal in her glance. 

“Then supposing I do it for you/* he suggested 
as he reached out for the blue-tinted form. 

“Would you?” she breathed in tremulous grati¬ 
tude. 

He did not answer her. And he did not look 
up at her again. But his gold-banded fountain-pen 
moved methodically across the application-blank as 
he wrote certain cryptic figures along its top. 

“What’s your name?” he asked. 

“Theresa McGuire,” answered the girl with the 
thick-lashed violet eyes that studied the shining pink 
skull between his temple-fringes. 

“Age?” he next perfunctorily inquired. 

“Twenty,” was the soft-noted reply. 

“References?” 

“I’ve this one from our minister at Marysville 
and this from the principal of the school where I 
taught kindergarten for a year.” 



A Paramount Picture. Manhandled. 

TESS LISTENED TO THE ARTIST, BUT COULD GLEAN LITTLE. 














MANHANDLED 


12 r 


Her color deepened as his cursory eye inspected 
the slightly dog-eared documents. 

“What city experience have you had ?” was his 
next preoccupied question. 

“I was cC dress-model for two weeks at Holton 
& Clark's.” 

“Why did you leave that firm ?” 

“Because my work there meant entertaining out- 
of-town buyers. And that wasn't the sort of thing 
I came to the city for.” 

“Of course,” was the other’s still impersonal re¬ 
ply. But the note of fierceness in her husky young 
voice brought his abstracted eyes up to her face. 
The man at the desk, for the first time, seemed to 
behold her as a living and breathing human being. 
He saw a slender-bodied girl whose limpid eyes, at 
the moment, were slightly luminous with excite¬ 
ment. The smooth texture of her healthy skin, 
just over the cheek-bones, was splashed with the 
same betraying sign of excitement. There was 
delicacy in the line of the straight short nose, just 
as there was a touch of ardent and untarnished 
youth in the poise of the back-thrust shoulders that 
would have appeared combative, but for the neu¬ 
tralizing soft curve of the red under-lip with the 
faintest trace of audacity about its comers. 

“What did you come to New York for?” the mail 


122 


MANHANDLED 


at the desk inquired, obviously more interested, at 
the end of that assessing stare. What he liked 
most about her was the look of gravity which the 
hooded eyes gave to a face not grave in itself, the 
suggestion of will in the courageous small chin. 

“I’ve a gift for acting and drawing,” she ex¬ 
plained, “and I wanted to do some kind of stage or 
art work.” 

“But Thorndyke’s is merely a department-store.” 
She saw his smile, remote as heat-lightning. It 
puzzled but it did not deter her. 

“I was hoping there’d be something in your art- 
department here.” 

“You must mean our advertising department,” 
he corrected. “We use artists there, of course, but 
they’re all trained men.” 

“Then you’ve nothing for me, after all?” 

He met her note of forlornness with a prolong¬ 
ing quiet smile that established an undefined some¬ 
thing between them. She could not have explained 
why, but she knew that he was definitely on her side, 
that he was ready to help her. Men were more 
generous than women, in that respect, if one only 
met them half-way. 

“Oh, yes, I have,” he said with a paternal hand 
on her arm. “I can give you a very good position 
at one of our basement counters.” 


MANHANDLED 


:i23 

Basement? That was where Pinkie’s Mr. Moy¬ 
sey held forth. 

“What would I have to do there?” she asked after 
he had spoken briefly over a phone and restored the 
receiver to its hook. 

“To begin with, you’d sell marked-down goods. 
That’s in our bargain-counter department. You’ll 
have to act as stock-girl, at first, and have instruc¬ 
tion in the class-room, three mornings a week, on 
selling and making out sales-slips and that sort of 
thing.” 

“Would I have to stay long with—with the 
marked-down goods?” she asked, a quaver of disap¬ 
pointment in her voice. If she leaned closer to him, 
she seemed unconscious of the movement. She had 
learned something about New York men in that 
fortnight at Holton and Clark’s. 

“I don’t think you’re the kind of girl who’d have 
to,” he said as his assessing eye once more swept 
her slender body. Then he added as he saw the 
slow flush that stained her face: “You’re the type 
of girl that wants to get on. I can see that. And 
a girl advances, my dear, precisely as she’s willing 
to please people.” 

If there was any deeper meaning to that speech, 
she preferred to ignore it. 

“I want to get on,” she murmured as she let her 


124 


MANHANDLED 


thoughtful violet eyes meet his. She hated sordid¬ 
ness, and she intended to fight her way out of it, out 
of the sordidness of side-street rooming-houses and 
dairy lunches and bargain-counters for marked- 
down goods. She did not wince, this time, at the 
weight of his hand on her arm. “It's good of you 
to help me,” she merely said in her husky and inti¬ 
mate murmur. He had, in some way, become 
faintly repugnant to her. But she was less afraid 
of him than before. 

“It’s nice to know I can continue to help you,” 
he observed in a solemnized tone of gallantry, lav¬ 
ing her with an emphasizing small smile that did not 
add to her happiness. 

She sat with downcast eyes, conscious of his dis¬ 
comforting close scrutiny. She was averse to ap¬ 
pearing bold, but, on the other hand, she was even 
more averse to antagonizing him. The eyes that 
rested on the white hollow of her throat, however, 
grew suddenly impersonal at the approach of a 
bespectacled official carrying a sheaf of papers. 

“Well, if you're to be one of us,” announced the 
employment manager, all business again as he rang 
a bell, “you may as well meet your aisle-manager. 
He’ll give you your number and place and explain 
things in general. Then he’ll pass you on to the 
timekeeper at the door and to the doctor for a 


MANHANDLED 125 

physical examination. Miss Stiner, take this young 
lady down to Mr. Moysey.” 

Miss Stiner maintained a dignified silence until 
the cage-door of the elevator swung shut behind 
them. 

“You’ve made a hit with the main top, Birdie, 
for he’s shooting you straight to counter-work,” 
she explained to the newcomer, who smiled with 
the fortifying thought that she had a friend at court. 
And the new employee at Thorndyke’s was relieved 
to find Mr. Moysey a much younger man than she 
had expected. He enclosed her within an aura of 
toilet-water that emanated from his slender-waisted 
body, led her with a pantherlike stride about the 
aisles of his subterranean world, and explained in 
a slightly mincing but unmistakably comprehensive 
manner just what was expected of her. 

They had turned a comer in this glorified rum¬ 
mage salesroom when there came to Tess’s ears the 
sound of a tangy voice which she thought she recog¬ 
nized. She wheeled in its direction, and there, sure 
enough, ensconsed behind a four-sided center lin¬ 
gerie counter in all her plump blonde fluffiness was 
Pinkie Doran herself. A long pencil protruded from 
her permanent wave, and her sales talk seemed 
somewhat impeded by gum as she assured the hatch¬ 
et-faced woman who was fingering a pair of unmen- 


126 MANHANDLED 

tionables, “Yes, ma’am, guaranteed Porto Rico 
lace.” 

Then she caught sight of Tess and made a sur¬ 
prised gesture with hand and mouth, plainly indicat¬ 
ing, “My Gawd.” The customer, looking up quick¬ 
ly, frowned and bristled as if she thought Pinkie 
intended disparagement of her. At any rate she 
stalked off without buying, and Miss Doran was 
free to give her attention to the neophyte, who came 
over to her, Mr. Moysey continuing wonderingly in 
her wake. 

“What are you doin’ here, dearie?” asked Pinkie. 
“Lookin’ for a job?” 

“I’ve already got the job,” smiled Tess. “I’m 
to work down here.” And then with a calculated 
smile at her guide, she added, “For Mr. Moysey.” 

He warmed up closer. 

“Are you and Miss Dofan acquainted?” he asked 
her. 

“Sure, Gerald,” Pinkie cut in, “we’re old pals. 
Fact is, I foolishly tipped her off to this place. And 
any friend of mine better treat her pretty nice too.” 

Naturally,” he glowed, “naturally.” 

If Pinkie saw in Tess a rival for the regard of 
the basement manager, it evidently didn’t annoy her. 

When he had led her farther afield in his king¬ 
dom and had announced that she might report for 


MANHANDLED 


127 


’duty the next morning, she thanked him in a voice 
still tremulous with gratitude. An indeterminate 
small glow of triumph eddied through her body as 
Mr. Moysey, in the shadow of the stairway, shook 
her hand with quite unnecessary warmth and ex¬ 
pressed the hope that they would always be the 
best of friends. 

Some remnant of that small glow still burned 
within her as she stepped into the street and headed 
for a corner drug-store, where she shut herself in 
a telephone-booth redolent of cigar-smoke and an¬ 
nounced her victory to Jim Hogan, who betrayed 
no undue joy over the news she was imparting to 
him. Jim, she knew, had altogether different plans 
for her. But she proposed to be something more 
than a tail to the kite of Jim’s problematic success. 
It was comfortable to know, of course, that Jim 
was willing to marry her. But he seemed without 
glamour in some way. And her ardent young heart 
still ached for its ever-receding dower of magnifi¬ 
cence. 

Yet she had made her first step toward that end, 
she told herself as she emerged into the dust-moated 
sunlight of the street. She was to be a part, an 
active and actual part, of this tremendous machinery 
that roared and seethed about her. She was no 
longer an outsider. And so immured was she in her 


128 


MANHANDLED 


own thoughts that she stood scarcely conscious of 
the fact that she had once more reached 'Fifth Ave¬ 
nue. She discovered this only when she found her¬ 
self confronted by the friendlier tides of traffic that 
flowed up and down that undulating canyon of com¬ 
motion overhung with its aureole of misty gold. 
She stood beside the curb, blinking out at the cara¬ 
van of cars that slithered companionably past hen 

There are all kinds and colors of cars in that 
regal procession, landaulets and limousines, sedans 
and broughams and cabriolets, of bottle green and 
Brewster green and willow green, of purple and 
maroon, of dove-gray and blue and brown and 
basket-weave canary, cars varnished and polished, 
nickeled and silvered, glass-prismed and glittering, 
flowing past her widened eyes in a blending and in¬ 
termingling double-stream of light and color. They 
moved and paused and slumbered on their talced 
rubber heels and moved on again with a rhythm not 
unlike the rhythm of music, pulsing in unison, an 
orchestra of wheeled movement solemnly conducted 
by a solemn blue figure with a whistle in his hand, 
an orchestra sonorous with its cadences of power. 
And the girl with the stippled violet eyes, watch- 
ing them, felt a small tingle of emotion touched 
with hunger creep up and down her spine. 

“It’s a big city, isn’t it?” coolly observed a lank 


MANHANDLED 


129 


and tired-looking stranger close to her elbow. And 
he laughed a little, even as she swept him with her 
icy stare of aversion. 

“I really couldn’t help it,” he explained, still un¬ 
ruffled. “You made me think of a fresh-hatched 
robin taking its first look over the nest-rim at a 
brand-new world!” 

“Xou’re not making it any more attractive to me,” 
she said with all the scorn at her command. 

“But you have for me,” he observed as he turned 
and sauntered on beside her. That, she remembered 
Jim -saying, was the trouble with New York. Men 
pursued women, in such places, as farm-dogs pur¬ 
sued rabbits. Yet her annoyer, she noticed, had 
at least the earmarks of a gentleman. 

“Who the devil are you, anyway?” he bruskly 
demanded. It was only the kindliness of his faded 
eye that kept the inquiry from being unalloyed im¬ 
pertinence. 

“I’m a shop-girl at Thomdyke’s,” she flung back 
at him. 

“Are you now?” he soliloquized aloud. “I’d 
never have thought it. And I’m Carl Garretson. 
Ah, I see that name means nothing to you. But if 
you happen across an especially bad novel on the 
newsstands it’s very likely to be mine.” 

“If it’s as bad as your manners, I don’t think 


MANHANDLED 


130 

I’d be interested/’ was her spirited retort. And he 
laughed again, still unruffled. 

“I like that,” he proclaimed. “I really do. And 
I like you. You’ll probably doubt it, but I don’t 
do this sort of thing as a rule. To tell the truth, 
you knocked my instincts galley-west, back there, 
by that crusader look I caught in your eyes. It 
only comes, you know, once or twice in a lifetime.” 

“While one can be insulted quite frequently,” she 
amended. 

He stopped short at that, his ruminative face 
touched with trouble. 

“My dear girl, I wouldn’t do that for the world. 
You’ll understand that when you know me better. 
I may be a bit eccentric, but I’m not a bounder. 
And the next time we meet I hope—well, I hope it 
will be under less clouded circumstances.” 

“I hope it will never occur,” she averred, almost 
against her will, for she found it hard to hate him, 
as she ought. 

“I intend to make it,” he announced, with his 
wearily unconcerned smile as he lifted his hat and 
turned away. 


CHAPTER X 


T ESS McGUIRE’S; first week in Thorndyke’s 
was a series of impressions that seemed to ob¬ 
literate one another like wave-marks on shore-sand. 
She vaguely resented being submerged to a mere 
number and being known as “Miss Fifty-Seven,” 
just as she more actively resented being associated 
with the sale of marked-down merchandise. She 
nursed a distaste for rearranging soiled silk lingerie 
tossed about by pushing and impatient women-shop- 
pers. 

For Mr. Moysey, confronted with the problem 
of just where to place this attractive newcomer, had 
been browbeaten by Pinkie Doran against his better 
judgment into making her the vivid blonde’s coun¬ 
ter-mate in the underwear section of the basement. 
This arrangement, Mr. Moysey was secretly quite 
sure, seemed very unwise. For he really flattered 
himself that he had made an impression on Tess, 
as she had on him, and he would have liked to se¬ 
clude her in some section of his domain, say among 
the garden tools, far away from the sharp-tongued 
Pinkie so as to be able to pursue this newer affair 
in comfort. Mr. Moysey was slightly ennuied at 

131 


MANHANDLED 


132 

the manner in which the ladies fell before his charm. 
It would be a jolly shame if a row should arise over 
having two of his feminine admirers overly close 
to each other. 

“Stick her back here, Jerry, or you and me are 
through,” was Pinkie’s ultimatum; and he had 
yielded. 

Tess at first entertained a mixture of amusement 
and distaste for her pert-faced fellow-saleslady, who 
impressed her as both too unshakably sure of her¬ 
self and too slangily garrulous. She disliked the 
obliterating dark store-uniform of black luster, and 
the noisy talk in the cafeteria where she could get 
a sustaining enough lunch for twenty cents, and the 
over-monitorial eye of the motherly old “hostess” 
in the Forward Club, who studied the girl with the 
gardenia-white throat and proceeded to warn her 
against the predatory modem male. A young lady, 
nowadays, was taken at her own rating. She must 
be a serious worker in a world of workers* And 
no self-respecting girl, she was reminded, accepted 
favors from men, without danger of finding a string 
attached to them. 

But Tess had done a little thinking of her own, 
in this matter of men. And even in their workaday 
world, she had found, a girl was still a girl. Men 
were the rulers of that world as Jim had said, but 


MANHANDLED 


*33 

tKey Had moods and moments when they were not 
imperial. The busiest of them liked beauty and 
freshness in their lives, just as they liked a flower 
on their office desk. It was almost one's duty to be 
appealing, since it was through this appeal that one 
progressed. And girls had learned a lot, since the 
world of business had been thrown open to them. 
They had been given a new freedom, and that had 
equipped them with new defenses. They carried 
their own latch-keys and their own ideas of right 
and wrong. And if men liked you, there was no law 
against letting them show it. There was a limit, 
of course. But the modem girl knew when that 
limit was being approached and had a workable 
enough sense of humor to laugh the old-fashioned 
perils away. 

So Tess made it a point not to ignore Mr. Moy¬ 
sey. She took a quiet joy in witnessing her aisle- 
manager's emergence from his shell of self-absorp¬ 
tion to show her how to make out her sales-slips 
and pass a purchase on to the wrappers and reas¬ 
semble rumpled silk night-dresses so they would 
look their best. If he leaned a little closer than 
was necessary, as he tutored the rapt-eyed newcomer 
in the secret of “dressing" her counter, that new¬ 
comer betrayed no outward sign of annoyance at 
his panther-like approach or his aromatic proxim- 


MANHANDLED 


I 34 1 

ity. For, as the worldly-wise Pinkie had informed 
her: “Stand in with that Moysey mutt and the 
rest’ll come easy!” So Tess was able to smile up 
at him, confidingly, as he fraternally picked a thread 
from her shoulder. And she condoned his playful 
tap of disapproval when she made a mistake in her 
sales-slip. Just as she endured his casual hand¬ 
clasp about her arm as he directed her gaze to the 
shelf-supply from which she was to replenish her 
stock. 

“Yuh got it, kid!” proclaimed Pinkie after dis¬ 
posing of a slightly shop-worn rose-silk brassiere to 
a stout lady who wheezed. 

“I’ve got what?” asked Tess, pressing an uncom¬ 
fortably cold hand against her uncomfortably hot 
cheek-bones. 

“What the frail-chasers fall for, kid,” was Pin¬ 
kie’s sagacious retort. “The call o’ the dingin’ vine 
to the he-oak! The come-hither look in the off 
lamp!” 

Tess was both annoyed and elated by that pro¬ 
nouncement. She was younger, younger in face 
and spirit, than the other girls about her. And if 
there was something about her that appealed to 
men, that marked her out from her meeker-spirited 
sisters, she was not to be blamed for what she could 
not help. She had no intention, at any rate, of 


MANHANDLED 


135 


cheapening herself. She had her own way to make, 
and she intended to make it honestly. She could 
afford to be lenient with Mr. Moysey. But there 
were limits beyond which the controller of her sub¬ 
terranean destinies would not be permitted to ven¬ 
ture. She had been a good girl, all her life. And 
she intended to remain one. 

[When he asked her, during one of the midday 
lulls, if she ever went to the movies, she said, with 
lowered eyes, and a silent prayer for Jim’s for¬ 
giveness, that she had always been afraid to go 
about alone in a strange city. When Mr. Moysey 
inquired if she would care to see the new picture 
at the Cameo some evening she thanked him trem¬ 
ulously and expressed the hope it would not make 
trouble among the other girls. And Mr. Moysey, 
growing bolder, assured her that the others no long¬ 
er stood within the range of his consideration. 

But a little later in the week she forgot Mr. Moy¬ 
sey just as she forgot the strange new weariness 
that made her temples throb, when she found her¬ 
self under prolonged inspection from a less dapper 
and a more discreetly remote figure. She realized 
that she was being studied by a brown-faced young 
man in tweeds, a somewhat shy-mannered man with 
genially studious eyes which looked impersonally 
out through thick-lensed glasses on that passing pan- 


136 [MANHANDLED 

orama known as life. Tess, who was not without 
a quick instinct for social values, knew at once that 
he was the socially right sort. There was distinc¬ 
tion in his very carelessness, in the careless forward 
thrust of his shoulders, in the careless swing of his 
cane and the unkemptness of the worn dog-skin 
gloves that dangled from a bulging side-pocket. 

Her pulse quickened perceptibly as he advanced 
somewhat diffidently toward her counter. Yet she 
preferred to ignore his presence as he came to a 
stop before her array of shop-soiled finery. When 
she looked up, she met his gaze with a cool eye 
which obviously added to his trepidation. 

“I should like this one, please,” he proclaimed, 
denoting with the ferruled end of his cane a near¬ 
by garment of salmon-pink. His color, for some 
reason, had deepened a little. 

“Four ninety-eight,” announced Miss Fifty- 
Seven as she reached for the designated garment 
of frilled silk. Yet the eyes of the man with the 
cane and the sales-girl with the soiled silk in her 
hands, for some equally mysterious reason, clung 
together. 

“Four ninety-eight,” she automatically repeated, 
with a tint of rose spreading over the gardenia- 
white and tan. She watched him as he reached ab¬ 
stractedly into his breast-pocket for a bill-fold. But 


MANHANDLED 


137 


instead of opening that oblong of morocco he con¬ 
tinued to study, the flushed face with the slightly 
luminous eyes. 

“You’re wonderful!” he startled Miss Fifty-Seven 
by slowly and impersonally intoning. 

“I beg your pardon/’ she retorted. And there 
was a sharpness in her words which did not add to 
his peace of mind. 

“I don’t do this sort of thing, you know,” he 
said in a panic which she recognized as being gen¬ 
uine. “I really don’t. But I’m an artist, you see. 
I’ve a—a weakness for form and color. And when 
I see a face like yours I—well, I’m afraid I rather 
forget myself.” 

“What’s wrong with' it?” demanded the violet¬ 
eyed girl, steeled into indignation by Pinkie’s de¬ 
risive titter beyond the counter-end. Authors and 
artists, apparently, were privileged persons in this 
new world of hers. 

“Good heavens, there’s nothing wrong with it,” 
proclaimed the solemn-eyed man. “The only thing 
is that it seems to be in the wrong place.” 

“Where would you prefer to see it?” was Tess’s 
none too conciliatory inquiry. 

“On canvas, of course,” was the other’s prompt 
and impersonal retort. “Pardon my asking, but 
have you ever posed ?” 


MANHANDLED 


138 

The slumberous violet eyes of Miss Fifty-Seven 
flashed with sudden fire. There was a limit, of 
course; and he was going beyond it. 

“How dare you ask me a thing like that?” she 
huskily demanded. “I’m a respectable girl and 
I’ve—” 

“Of course you are,” cut in the startled artist. 
“I could see that at a glance. That’s your charm. 
But you don’t understand. I don’t mean nudes—■ 
costume stuff. I’m doing mural panels for the new 
Art Theater and you looked so fresh and wonder¬ 
ful above that bank of soiled finery—” 

“Old stuff!” audibly interrupted Pinkie Doran 
from the counter-end. 

“You looked so vivid and vital,” pursued the 
man in tweeds, “that I’m afraid I rather forgot my¬ 
self. Artists do that now and then.” 

Tess’s face softened again. And her eyes be¬ 
came more ruminative. 

“I’m an artist myself,” she quietly admitted. “At 
least, I’ve tried to be one.” 

“What do you work in?” he asked, perceptibly 
interested. 

She did not answer him. Instead, she took up 
her pencil and sales-book and on a blank-page 
blocked out with a few quick strokes an exaggerated 
but unmistakable portrait of Mr. Moysey. 


MANHANDLED 


139 


“That’s clever/’ admitted the artist as she passed 
the sheet over to him. “Quite clever!” But his, 
enthusiasm, Tess was quick to see, was not without 
its qualifications. “I wish I could show you some¬ 
thing of mine. But it’s all in my studio. And I 
don’t suppose you’d care to drop in there some 
day ?” 

“I’m not in the habit of dropping in at strangers’ 
studios,” she reminded him. Yet some floating 
aroma of adventure quickened her pulse. 

“Of course you’re not,” he agreed. “But I was 
wondering if we couldn’t make it a sort of a busi¬ 
ness-meeting, say for some off Sunday. I’d give 
an arm to get that tan and gardenia tone down 
against the right background.” 

The gardenia slowly deepened to a pale rose. 
There was something unmistakably arresting about 
this eccentric artist with the slightly abashed eyes. 
And the aroma of romance thickened about Miss- 
Fifty-Seven. 

“Sunday’s my only free day,” she finally acknowl¬ 
edged. 

The abashed eyes blinked meditatively behind the 
thick glasses. 

“I was going down to Long Island for the week¬ 
end. But I can cut that. Couldn’t I phone my 
married sister to run in from Morristown on Sun- 


MANHANDLED 


140 

day, to be a sort of floor-walker while we’re finish¬ 
ing up our crumpets and tea?” 

Jess’s thoughtful eyes studied his face. There 
was an air of honesty about it that she liked. And 
he could help her, she remembered, in the things 
where she most needed help. 

‘Til leave that to you,” she said, unsettled as to 
which course seemed the more advantageous. But 
it was a new friendship, and a new friendship meant 
a new chance. 

“Then we’ll make it Sunday afternoon at two. 
My name’s Brandt, Robert Brandt, and my studio’s 
the third from the corner in Washington Square 
South. Is that a bargain ?” 

She nodded, almost shyly, embarrassed at the 
discovery that he was solemnly shaking hands with 
her. Her embarrassment increased as he continued 
to hold her hand, while his intent yet impersonal 
eyes continued their study of her face. And it at¬ 
tained the boiling point when she happened to look 
beyond Brandt and discovered a pair of tired brown 
eyes raised in slightly mocking surprise at both of 
them and a drawling voice warning, “Flirting with 
my employees is strictly prohibited.” 

She was frightened for an instant, and then she 
saw that the owner of the brown eyes, a tall, slightly 
stooped young man carelessly well dressed in a mod- 


MANHANDLED 


141 


est business suit and bareheaded, was fooling. 
Brandt had turned away from her to face the in¬ 
truder, and the latter now addressed him chidingly, 
“So this is why you disappeared from my office. 
Bob, when dad sent for me. That’s a great stunt- 
offer to blow me to lunch, and then beat it away 
as soon as my back is turned and hide in my base¬ 
ment. Not only that, but ruin the discipline of my 
store by inflicting yourself on one of my young 
ladies to whom you have certainly never been in¬ 
troduced.” 

“I just introduced myself. Thought I’d have a 
look around while I waited for you, you know, 
and—” 

“Then introduce me.” 

“All—right. Miss—er-—” 

Tess, now enjoying the encounter, told him her 
name. 

“Miss McGuire, this is Charles Thorndyke, junior 
partner in this establishment by the grace of luck 
and a wealthy father.” 

Thorndyke scrutinized her with lazy and careful 
boldness. 

“Well, I must admit, old man, you have excel¬ 
lent taste. And now shall we go to lunch?” 

Brandt turned back to her as Thorndyke started 
away, ventured a timid smile and said, I hope this 


142 


MANHANDLED 


rude interruption hasn’t made you forget our ap¬ 
pointment. I’m looking forward to it.” 

“So am I,” she smiled, not without a bit of co¬ 
quetry in it, and was rather gratified that Thorn- 
dyke looked back also as the two men disappeared 
around the corner of the pots and pans section. 

She was still smiling over the further discovery 
that Mr. Robert Brandt had forgotten both his 
parcel and his change when she looked up to see 
Jim Hogan standing close beside her counter. His 
eyes were unexpectedly dark with resentment as he 
stared after the departing figures, one with the cane 
crooked over his elbow and the other swaggering 
carelessly with the air of one who was monarch 
of all he surveyed. 

“You seem to be starting well,” Jim said with a 
note of bitterness which took the smile from the 
face of Miss Fifty-Seven. 

“Not so badly,” she said with self-protective lev¬ 
ity. Then, willing to forgive the unjustifiable harsh¬ 
ness in his greeting in the unexpected pleasure of 
seeing him, she asked, “How do you happen to be 
down this way, Jim?” 

“I delivered a repair job in the neighborhood,” 
he explained, still sulkily. “But I seem to have 
dropped in at a bad time.” 

She flushed and her violet eyes narrowed danger-v 


MANHANDLED 143 

ously. If Jim thought he could bully her away 
from other men— 

She recovered quickly and said, as the suspicious¬ 
eyed Mr. Moysey bore down on them: “You’d bet¬ 
ter buy something quick, or I’ll end up before I’ve 
really got started.” 

“I’ll take that camisole thing,” asserted the mo¬ 
rose-eyed Jim. “But is it a practise in this store 
to hold a customer’s hand after a purchase?” 

Tess did not answer him. He seemed, of a sud¬ 
den, very far away from her. 

“Are you going to< stay in this dump?” he in¬ 
quired after a glance about the counters of shop¬ 
worn merchandise. And the panther-like Mr. Moy¬ 
sey started perceptibly at that opprobrious epithet 
of “dump.” 

“Of course not,” was her somewhat unexpected 
reply. “I’m going to stay here only until I can 
move on to something better.” 

The morose look in Jim’s eye merged into one of 
hunger. 

“Then why not move on to me,” he suggested. 
“I’m making good at my new job, and I’ve been 
promised a substantial raise in six months. That 
means, even if my carburetor doesn’t come through, 
we could move into one of those Ninety-Eighth 
Street apartments any day now, and save enough 


144 


MANHANDLED 


for a place of our own in Mt. .Vernon before this 
town gets us both.” 

Tess, with her eyes half-closed, was remembering 
the crowded and colorful panorama of Fifth Ave¬ 
nue as one looks up the long slope of Murray Hill. 
And it did not seem the sort of place to “get” one, 
to burn one’s soul away, as Jim lugubriously pre¬ 
dicted. 

“I think New York is wonderful,” she said with 
a slow shake of her head. “And I think you are 
wonderful, Jim. But there’s something big and un¬ 
tried here that I can’t seem to turn away from. 
It’s like going up a hill you’ve never gone up be¬ 
fore, a hill where you could see almost anything 
from the top. And I’d always feel cheated if I 
didn’t go up that hill—and go up on my own feet.” 

Jim, without looking at it, took the parcel which 
she handed to him. 

“But supposing it doesn’t lead to what you’re 
looking for?” he demanded, trying to enclose her 
hand in his. 

“It won’t—but I’m on my way,” she retorted 
with one of her self-defensive flippancies. 

“Then remember that I’m waiting, when you’re 
tired of the climb,” he told her, so quietly that she 
scarcely suspected the valorous effort it was cost¬ 
ing him. 


manhandled: 


145 


Her eyes thanked him as he turned away. She 
loved him, she knew, for his loyalty, for his pa¬ 
tience, for that dogged devotion which had sur¬ 
vived the turbulent quarrels of high school days. 
But there was one side of her that Jim could never 
understand. 

She sighed as she refolded three ruffled pieces of . 
lingerie which an angular, woman with hennaed 
hair had disdainfully inspected and thrust aside. 
Miss Fifty-Seven was scarcely conscious of the - 
feline movement of Mr. Moysey as he turned and 
stooped over her discarded sales-book. It was not 
until she noticed the pink flesh above the constrict¬ 
ing wing-collar mysteriously darken to* a dull mag- 
neta that she realized he was intent on an inspec¬ 
tion of a carbon copy of his own caricatured figure. 

Slowly he drew himself up to full height. 

“And who is this supposed to be?” he demanded, 
confronting her with the fatal page. 

Miss Fifty-Seven felt the blood mount to her face. 

“It’s just a drawing,” she feebly contended, 
vaguely disturbed by inarticulate noises coming 
from Pinkie Doran’s averted face. 

“You may find it a somewhat expensive one/’ 
announced the indignant aisle-man as he slowly de¬ 
leted the obnoxious page from the pad. 

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” murmured the girl. 


146 MANHANDLED 

with downcast eyes. “I wouldn’t do that, for the 
world!” 

But humility was a salve too thin for a hurt so 
deep. 

“Kindly bear in mind, Miss McGuire, that our 
projected evening at the Cameo Theater is now a 
thing of the past,” Mr. Moysey proclaimed with all 
the dignity at his command. 

The bruised violet eyes watched him as he turned 
away. 

“And you may not climb out of this dump” he 
added as he swung about on her again, “as quickly 
as some of your friends would like to see you.” 

Miss Fifty-Seven watched the controller of her 
destinies as he passed down between his brightly 
laden counters. Then she sighed, for the second 
time in one afternoon. These men who* were so 
willing to‘hold out a hand to you didn’t always 
help you, after all, as much as they promised. 


CHAPTER XI 


W HEN, the following Sunday, Robert Brandt 
admitted the rapt-eyed and slightly tremu¬ 
lous Tess to his Washington Square Studio he no¬ 
ticed an unmistakable shade of disappointment creep 
over her face. He thought, at first, that this was 
because she had found him alone in his bachelor 
quarters, and he was unnecessarily explicit in his 
explanations of why his married sister had failed 
to put in an appearance from Morristown. But 
Tess saw her spirit of high adventure dashed by 
quite another circumstance. For one quick and eager 
glance about the room persuaded her she was not 
to be confronted by the splendor which she had 
vaguely expected in such a place. It impressed 
her, in fact, as a chamber of rather crowded shab¬ 
biness, harboring things that looked dishearteningly 
old, old bronzes and old tapestries and old furniture. 
And the studio itself, with its stained easels and 
worn dummies and littered draughting-tables, took 
on the general air of a work-room none too care¬ 
fully kept. 

She sat chilled and quiet as Brandt made tea in 
a somewhat battered samovar which, he explained, 
147 


MANHANDLED 


148 

he had picked up somewhere in the Ukraine. She 
betrayed the honest appetite of youth before his 
buttered crumpets and cinnamon-toast, but she re¬ 
mained oddly self-immured until he ventured to 
show her a few of the things, “the little things,” as 
he phrased it, which he had been working on. 

Her instinctive feeling for art told her there were 
both power and beauty in those paintings of his. 
And before the accumulating knowledge of his skill 
her coolness slowly fell away from her. Her earlier 
vague sense of having been cheated out of some¬ 
thing vanished as he confronted her with the canvas 
of a eager-eyed ballet-dancer caught in a graceful 
pose. 

“That’s beautiful,” she acknowledged, with an 
involuntary catch of the breath. And Brandt’s own 
face lighted up a little at the genuineness of her 
tribute. 

“That’s called The Ballet Dancer,” he explained. 
“It’s one of a four-panel series I’m doing for the 
lobby of the new Art Theater that’s to be started 
this winter. My second is to be Comedy —the same 
girl with head thrown back and laughing, hair run¬ 
ning riot and whole body expressing light-hearted 
abandon, but still with a little note of pathos shad¬ 
ing through all her vivacity—eternal, joyous youth 
with pathos lurking just around the corner.” 


MANHANDLED 


149 


“That ought to be equally wonderful,” ventured 
the violet-eyed girl at his side, not altogether at 
home in regions so remote. 

“I think I could make it that, with your help,” 
was Brandt’s retort. 

His words sent a tingle of nerve-ends scamper¬ 
ing up and down Tess’s body. She had been won¬ 
dering if it was true that success, after all, did not 
bring one happiness. 

“How could I help you?” she asked, smiling at 
the intent look with which he was studying her face. 

“By being very uncomfortable for a few hours,” 
was his answer. “By putting on this costume and 
standing very still. I mean, by being exactly what 
you are at this very moment.” 

“But what am I?” she asked, coloring a little 
and not for the moment looking at the flimsy cos¬ 
tume he offered her. 

He shrugged his shpulders in a sign of helpless¬ 
ness. 

“I don’t think I could say it, in words. It’s a 
sort of mixture of being ardent and determined and 
innately pure, of being young and untried and at the 
same time the acme of studied grace and poise. It’s 
that and something more I can’t quite put into 
words. The only way I could express it, I imagine, 
would be on canvas.” 


MANHANDLED 


150 

“But how do you know I’d do?” she asked, her 
elation sobered with a touch of disappointment at 
an interest in her that seemed more professional 
than personal. 

“Let’s try,” he suggested, as she stood hesitantly, 
the gauzy draperies still in a rumpled bundle in her 
hands. “You can change your clothes behind that 
screen over there.” 

She shook out the costume and inspected it, and 
as she did so a warm flush started spreading slowly 
over her face. She looked at it again, somewhat 
blankly as if wondering if there were not more to 
it than appeared at first glance. There was a richly 
brocaded band to fit snugly across her breast, a pair 
of abbreviated tights, and a long skirt of very light, 
diaphanous material—and that was all! 

“Isn’t there more—to it—than this?” she asked 
in a very small voice. 

“Ballet dancers don’t burden themselves with 
clothes,” he explained impatiently, anxious to get 
to his work. Then, evidently remembering that he 
wasn’t dealing with a professional model, he added 
more kindly, “You’ll get used to it. Meantime, I’ll 
call my landlady and have her stand by while you’re 
changing and posing, if you like.” 

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she answered with a little 
reckless toss of her head and retired behind the 


MANHANDLED 151 

screen with her scandalous burden. But when, hav¬ 
ing cast aside her conventional attire, she had draped 
her white body scantily with the meager chest-strip, 
the tiny tights and the flowing skirt that revealed 
every contour of her sleek slim legs, she was covered 
farmore fully with embarrassment than with clothes. 
She surveyed herself in the full-length mirror that 
formed one panel of the screen that concealed her 
from him, and wondered if the blushes that surged 
in waves into her cheeks were too self-revelatory. 
True, she had often gone swimming with Todd and 
other men with rather less on than this. But some¬ 
how it was different now. But why? She could 
not expect to pose as a ballet-dancer in a fur coat 
and spats. And, mingled with her uneasiness, was 
the steadying confidence and' pride, as she glimpsed 
the sweep of her graceful exposed body from the 
top of her burnished-brown head to the curve of her 
pink heel, that he would see in her all that he had 
hoped and prophesied. 

And so, having remained behind the screen so 
long that he was irritably afraid she had funked 
and was going to disappoint him, she now stepped 
out. She emerged with a nonchalance that sur¬ 
prised even herself, and faced him smilingly. 

“Now stand on that dais,” he ordered, pointing 
to the little raised platform draped with black velvet. 


I S 2 manhandled 

‘Tut your weight on the ball of your right foot 
and stretch your hands out to either side, so. As 
if you were in the midst of a dance. His hands 
touched her impersonally as he steadied her into 
the pose. Then he stepped back. 

He turned deliberately away. He was so wholly 
absorbed in getting on with his painting, so ap¬ 
parently unaware of her warm revealed loveliness 
that, all of her shyness and fear calmed, she was 
even a bit disappointed. No wonder, she thought, 
that professional models, even those accustomed to 
posing in the nude, became so blase about their un¬ 
usual means of livelihood. 

He fussed for a moment or two with the skylight 
curtains. At length he turned, studying her with 
narrowed eyes as he backed away to where his easel 
stood. 

“That’s wonderful,” he said in a sort of gasp. 
“God, if I could only get that down before our 
light goes! Could you hold it, exactly as you are?” 

“I’ll try,” Tess told him, infected by his excite¬ 
ment, for the first time, as he fell to blocking out his 
canvas. 

Yet he became oddly calm as he worked. He 
came to her side, once, to tilt up the chin. When 
she announced that she was tired he flung aside his 
palette and laughed foolishly and tossing her a 


MANHANDLED 


r 53 

dressing-gown told her to rest. Then he brought 
her a glass of rather sour-tasting wine and laughed 
again, after which he absorbedly inspected his paint- 
smeared canvas and fell to pacing a cleared spot 
along the studio floor. 

“My dear, you’re a God-sent angel,” he solemnly 
asserted as he came to a stop before where she sat 
with her shoulders slightly drooping under the 
weight of her weariness. “You’re giving me some¬ 
thing I can never pay you back for.” 

“But you can pay me back,” she reminded him 
as he returned to his easel and studied the unfinished 
picture. 

“How?” he asked as he stepped toward her again.. 

“Perhaps we could make it an exchange of serv¬ 
ices,” she suggested, her smile more provocative 
than she had intended it to be. 

He stopped short, at that, with an odd darkening 
of the eyes behind the big lenses. 

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, almost 
combatively. And she was able to smile again at 
the note of hostility in his voice. 

“I mean that I want to know a little more about 
art, about drawing and modeling. And if I can help 
you by posing, perhaps you could help me by crit¬ 
icism.” 

This seemed to puzzle him. 


MANHANDLED 


154 

“But where’d we get a chance for that, if you’re 
engaged with other work?” 

“My evenings are free,” she explained. “At 
least some of them,” she amended. “And if you 
have to do your painting by daylight, I could give 
you my Sundays.” 

He stood looking down at her, without moving. 
It was very quiet in the studio, where the diffused, 
light glinted on the metallic trimming of her breast- 
strip showing through the open dressing-gown. 

“That would be wonderful,” he said with a short 
intake of the breath. “But it might also be dan¬ 
gerous.” 

“Why dangerous?” she innocently inquired. 

He put a hand on her sparsely draped shoulder. 

“Because, my dear, you have that mysterious 
something which was probably at the foot of the 
Trojan war, if you get what I mean.” 

“I don’t,” she protested, permitting her gaze to 
look with his. 

“No, you wouldn’t,” he meditatively acknowl¬ 
edged. He moved back a step or two, with a gesture 
that seemed almost defensive. Then he stared 
frowningly about at the thinning flight. 

“Let’s work,” he said, almost bruskly, as he re¬ 
turned to his easel. And she smiled faintly as she 
dropped her protective covering and once more took 


MANHANDLED 


155 


up the pose he had asked for. She had forged a 
new link in her chain of friendships. He would 
be like the others, when the time for it was ripe. 
He would make love to her, as the others had done. 
And through that mysterious something he had 
spoken of she would hold and claim his friendship. 

Yet it piqued her a trifle, when she stole a glance 
at his preoccupied face, to find Brandt so immured 
in his brush-work. To him, at the moment, she 
was merely a series of tones and planes which the 
diminishing light was slowly taking away from his 
repeated assessing scrutiny. He was still working 
against time, in fact, when his'door was flung open 
and a man in a raglan strode unceremoniously into 
the room. 

“You moiling ant!” he loudly proclaimed as his 
eye fell on the man at the easel. Then his eye trav¬ 
eled on to Tess, a little pale with fatigue on the 
model-throne. 

“Who’s the pippin in tights ?” Abruptly he rec¬ 
ognized her and added, “Gad, Bob, you work fast. 
You worm yourself into the confidence of the fair¬ 
est of my staff and then you lure her here to your 
den.” 

Tess turned to see if it was really Thomdyke who 
was speaking with such regal offhandedness, and 
verified her guess. Fighting down quite success- 


MANHANDLED 


*56 

fully her embarrassment at this new complication, 
she gave him a casual smile of welcome. She 
wanted him to infer that she did this sort of thing 
out of working hours and did it as a. matter of 
course. 

Tess could, however, see Brandt's frown of re¬ 
sentment as he put down his brushes. She did not 
catch the word or two that passed between the men. 
But the newcomer’s manner was still depressingly 
preoccupied as he nodded to her and inquired of 
his host just what there was about the place to 
drink. 

It was not until Brandt had produced a bottle, 
which he described as Barbara straight from the 
Taormina, that the newcomer proclaimed himself. 
To his friends, including Tess, he was “Chip Thorn- 
dyke.” And there was little hope for Brandt, added 
the man with the glass, if his host’s taste in art was 
no better than his taste in hootch. 

Tess, studying Thorndyke as he drank, tried not 
to dislike him. His face was lean and sun-browned 
and athletic-looking, and at the back of his audacious 
eyes always seemed to bum a faint glimmer of 
amusement. But he was not yet really conscious of 
her existence. And that was a disappointment to 
her. She had to snatch at acquaintances, she knew, 
as a brook-trout snatches at food. She still had to 


MANHANDLED 


*57 


take what the currents of chance brought to her. 
Except for Jim, she was detached and alone, in that 
city of strangers, with no connections and no claim 
to a background. She had to web into that fabric, 
careful thread by thread, where each new friend 
meant a newer sense of security. 

So she was not guiltless of a deliberate effort to 
stir the lethargic Chip Thomdyke out of his indiffer- 
ency. She let her eyes meet his, openly, as she 
declined his proffered cigarette. She turned the 
soft artillery of her smile on him as he sat smoking 
in Brandt’s black-oak armchair. And when she 
found the room growing close and allowed the 
dressing-gown to fall away from her warm neck 
she noticed his wavering eyes finally focus and fix 
on the gardenia-white of her throat and shoulders. 

“Are you a model when you’re not working for 
me?” he asked as he picked up her fallen handker¬ 
chief and restored it to her hand. He half laugh¬ 
ingly clamped her fingers about the clustered cam¬ 
bric, as though intimating that it should not again 
be dropped. 

“No, she’s not,” Brandt promptly answered for 
her. 

“And you don’t want to go on the stage,” pur¬ 
sued Thorndyke, ignoring the other man, “or have 
a fling at the movies?” 


MANHANDLED 


158 

“l wanted to, but they didn’t want me,” she coun¬ 
tered, not unconscious of the derisive note in his 
voice. 

“It’s what ardent youth usually pants for,” he 
lightly proclaimed. 

“I pride myself on being rather practical-minded.” 

He stopped short, with the bottle of Barbara in 
his hand, and studied her. 

“I believe you are,” he finally admitted. “And 
you’d need to be, in this burg!” He waited, with 
his watch in his hand, frowning a little at the flush 
that came and went from her face. “What are we 
doing to-night?” he asked, carelessly enough, but 
with a gesture, Tess noticed, which unmistakably 
included her. 

The ensuing silence was not without its signifi¬ 
cance. And Brandt made no effort to bridge the 
chasm. 

“I never dreamed it was so late,” ventured Tess, 
with a glance at the faded old banjo-clock above 
the cast-strewn mantel. She and Jim, she guiltily 
remembered, were to have a frugal dinner together 
at an Italian table d'hote and then go for an experi¬ 
mental ride in a borrowed car in which he had been 
busy all day installing the carburetor that was to 
make his fortune, and hers, if she chose. 

It was Chip Thorndyke, she noticed with a second 


MANHANDLED 


159 


small wave of triumph, who first came over to her 
as she reappeared from behind the screen in her 
street attire. And when she explained that she 
would have to be up-town within half an hour 
Thorndyke wearily announced that he had his bus 
at the door and would run her up if she wanted a 
lift 

Brandts frown of displeasure did not escape her 
as she accepted that offer. Her spirits rose per¬ 
ceptibly, however, as she shook hands with her host 
and let Thorndyke pilot her down the dark hall¬ 
ways and seat her in a coffee-colored speed-roadster, 
long and low and oddly duplicating the debonair 
aspect of its owner. 

“How about a rickey?” he companionably in¬ 
quired as they sped up the twilit avenue, shoulder 
to shoulder in the low seats. 

Tess shook her head. It was the first time, she 
remembered, that she had ever traversed New York 
in a private motor-car. And the moment was not 
without its glamour. 

“Where are you going?” he asked as they ar¬ 
rowed northward under the blinking colored lights. 

“You’d better drop me at the Astor,” she sug¬ 
gested. She was pathetically anxious to say this 
as airily as possible, though it would mark the first 
time she had been in that plush-lined hostelry. The 


i6o 


MANHANDLED 


garage from which Jim was getting the car was on 
Forty-fifth Street, and he had suggested meeting 
her near the entranceway at the north side to the 
hotel. “But haven’t we passed Forty-fifth Street?” 
she asked suddenly. 

“I’m going by a little private way of my own,” 
he lightly explained. “Now, tell me about your¬ 
self,” he said as they swung into the park. 

“I’d much rather hear about you,” she countered, 
feeling the weight of his arm against her breast as 
they swerved about a sharper turn of the driveway. 

“The only important thing about me,” he said 
with his careless laugh, “is that I’m aching to run 
you down to Pierre’s for dinner.” 

“It couldn’t be done,” she replied, also laughing. 
It was as he leaned closer to her that she added a 
qualifying: “Not to-night.” 

“That leaves me something to live for,” he amend¬ 
ed as they turned south again. “Where’ll I be able 
to find you?” 

“Well, I run a bargain-counter in the basement of 
your store,” she laughed. 

“Why waste your sweetness on that desert air?” 
he lightly inquired. 

“Why shouldn’t I ?” was her counter-inquiry. 

“Because you’re altogether too adorable,” he pro¬ 
claimed, lifting one hand from the wheel. He had 


MANHANDLED 


161 


been indifferent to her, at first. But she knew, now, 
even before his next movement, that he was going 
to kiss her. 

It was an aerial and oblique and unsatisfactory: 
kiss, snatched on the wing, but it prompted him to 
pat her knee with fraternal approval. Her eye, 
resting on the dash-board stippled with burnished 
metal, harvested from that prospect an impression 
of richness, of richness touched with power. And 
she found it hard to reprove him. 

“You must never do that again,” she said as she 
lifted her eyes and studied his face. He merely 
laughed at her solemnity. 

“All right,” he agreed. “You’ve got to believe 
in me, if we’re going to play around together.” 

“I’d have to,” she quietly asserted. And that 
sobered him. But only for a minute or two. 

“Some night soon,” he proclaimed, “we’re going 
to take this old bus and run out to Westbury. I 
know a quiet little place out there where we can 
have a grouse dinner and dance and motor in by 
moonlight. No, don’t put on that startled gazelle 
look! It’s a perfectly respectable place patronized 
by perfectly respectable people. You’ll be sitting 
next to some of the best-known names in this sedate 
old city of ours. And you’ll love it.” 

He did not wait for an answer as he swerved in 


MANHANDLED 


162 

to the carriage-entrance of the Astor. He didn’t 
even seem to expect one. 

“So long,” he said with his habitual lounging 
carelessness. “My duty will call me down to the 
basement, remember, in a day or two.” 

Tess did not answer him. For as they drew up 
at the curb she caught sight of Jim’s disconsolate 
figure standing on the hot Astor steps. And Jim’s 
startled eyes were on her as she got down from the 
running-board of the rakish-looking roadster. She 
ran up the steps to him, with a perfunctory back¬ 
ward wave of the hand to the man at the wheel. 
She even smiled contritely as she detected a faint 
note of hostility on the younger man’s face. 

“Oh, Jim, I’m late,” she admitted with a child¬ 
like clutch at his coat-sleeve. 

“Only fifty-five minutes!” was Jim’s grim re¬ 
joinder. His face was equally grim as he stared 
after the departing roadster. 

“Who’s that?” he demanded. 

“That’s Chip Thorndyke, who was kind enough 
to give me a lift up from Washington Square.” 

“What were you doing down there, anyway?” 

.That, Tess remembered, was the trouble in try¬ 
ing to have more friends than one. There was an 
unreasoning and appropriative sort of selfishness 
about men, a selfishness that left one friendship 


MANHANDLED 


163 


always threatening to neutralize the other. And 
Tess’s first impulse, displeased as she stood at the 
proprietory note in Jim’s voice, was to confront 
him with the disturbingly bald truth, scandalous 
costume and all. Instead of that, however, she 
caught him by the arm and swung him half-pa¬ 
tiently and half-imperially about. 

“Look at me,” she commanded, with' an achieved 
tenderness in her eyes. “Are you still angry with 
me?” 

“What were you doing in Washington Square?” 
he repeated, his tone less granite-like, nevertheless, 
as he gazed down into the pools of stippled violet. 

“Why, I told you I was going to take an art-les¬ 
son,” she explained, doing her best to keep her little 
tumult of excitement under cover. “And I’m going 
to have more of them, every Sunday!” 

His face hardened again. 

“But don’t you see, Jim, how much more this 
will mean to me?” she asked as her narrowed eyes 
studied his face. “It may give me a chance to do 
something with my drawing.” 

“I wish to God your drawing was at the bottom 
of the Hudson,” he said as he moved on again in 
response to her tug. “And what’s more, I can’t 
see you getting much good out of that Greenwich 
.Village truck!” 


MANHANDLED 


164 

She studied him for the second time. 

“Jini, you need a hair-cut/' she said with a re¬ 
storative sort of irrelevance. But it wasn't until 
she had relinked her arm through his and pressed 
closer to his side in the Broadway traffic that she 
detected any softening of his eyes. 


CHAPTER XII 

T ESS, (luring the ensuing weeks, found an odd 
_ tide of excitement rising and eddying about 
her, crowding her day with movement and sending 
her bone-tired to bed in Mrs. Binner’s sulphur-col¬ 
ored second-floor front. She also 1 found herself 
immersed in an equally odd shifting of values. She 
felt, as she grew less timid in her contact with 
others and more sophisticated in all matters of ap¬ 
parel, that she was slowly becoming citified. 

She watched and recorded and frugally extended 
her little urbanized treasury of wisdom. She be¬ 
came more penurious and at the same time more 
prodigal, taking discreet advantage of the depart¬ 
ment-store’s twenty per cent, discount to its clerks 
and curbing her appetite for food to indulge a new¬ 
found appetite for clothes. Even her earlier dis¬ 
taste for the tarnished magnificence which she doled 
out to the casual bargain-seeker seemed to pass 
away, and she became less intolerant of the inti¬ 
macies of the ever-talkative Pinkie, who had astute¬ 
ly remarked Jim Hogan’s continued hovering about 
the doorway at closing time, one day, and Carl Gar- 
165 


166 


MANHANDLED 


retson’s explorative visit to the Thorndyke base¬ 
ment, the next day. 

“Keep 'em danglin', dearie," was Pinkie’s prompt 
advice. “You've gotta let 'em pet you a little, I’d 
also add, or you don’t get a look in. Watch your 
step, but don't go slow. For times is changed, 
birdie, since grand-maw swooned when grand-paw 
kissed her on the lace mitten. They've got things 
speeded up since them stage-coach days, and if you 
want to step with the procession you've gotta acquire 
a twin-six gait. And you're dead right, dearie, 
about not wastin' time on the pikers. Go after the 
big game, and when you make your killin' you've got 
something to carry you through to the next open 
season in spenders." 

“I could never be nice to a man," asserted Tess, 
“if I didn’t really care for him. Even if I cared for 
him, I’d see that he treated me with respect." 

“You'll stow that hay-tosser stuff when you get 
to be a little more of a Noo-Yawker," contended the 
cynical Pinkie. “You’re young yet, dearie, and 
you ain’t wise to the ways of this big city. What 
we all want is a MAN, tied up and ready to take 
home. But men are so gun-shy in this vamp-ridden 
burg you've sure gotta chloroform 'em with some¬ 
thing stronger’n flattery before you can get the 
cuffs on 'em." 


MANHANDLED 


167 

“But it’s not men I want/’ protested the rumina¬ 
tive-eyed Miss Fifty-Seven. “What I want is to 
get out of a bargain-counter basement.” 

“Well, it’s men who’ll get you out,” averred 
Pinkie. “They’re the steppin’ stones, dam ’em, by 
which we rise to higher things. And you were the 
wise baby to eat crow with Mista Moysey this 
morning. You’ve got him weakenin’. But as I 
know Jerry, it’ll take a long season o’ remorse to 
make up for givin’ that rim-cut to his dignity. And 
you played the right card, kid, when you pulled your 
timid-doe stuff on young Mr. Thorndyke yesterday. 
You’re the only skirt in this cellar who’s ever got 
ten minutes out o’ the boss’s busy day. And we 
sure lose nothin’ by havin’ a night-line or two set 
out for a haul!” 

Tess resented that over-frank exposition of her 
aims. 

“I’m not asking for favors,” she contended. “I 
want to play fair, if they’ll only let me.” 

“But what’re you goin’ to give ’em, for value 
received?” inquired the cool-eyed Pinkie. 

“What do other girls give men who are nice to 
them ?” demanded Miss Fifty-Seven. 

“Here’s a sugar-baby that’s supposed to know 
something about that,” remarked Pinkie, with a 
glance down the aisle. “Ask him.” 


i68 


MANHANDLED 


Tess looked up to see Chip Thomdyke bearing 
urbanely down on her. 

Pinkie discreetly withdrew to the other end of the 
counter as, with a reconnoitering look around, he 
approached Tess. 

“How about running up to Clairmont to dinner 
tonight?” he asked in a low voice, endeavoring to 
give the appearance to the rest of the basement of 
merely questioning Miss Fifty-Seven quite prop¬ 
erly about a detail of her work. 

“I’d love to,” said Tess, oblivious to Pinkie’s ex¬ 
cited eye. 

Yet during that drive up to Clairmont and dur¬ 
ing that dinner she was conscious of a disturbing 
new element in the situation. It was something that 
left her thoughtful at the touch of his fingers against 
her flesh, at the half-humorous look of hunger in 
his eyes. 

“Let’s drop in and look over my apartment,” he 
suggested after the run down Riverside Drive. And 
she knew, then, that the vague menace was disclos¬ 
ing itself. 

“Thank you,” she coolly retorted. “But: this isn’t 
that kind of a party.” 

He laughed, apparently without resentment. “Lit¬ 
tle igloo!” he murmured, disturbing her more than 
ever by the lightness with which he had taken Her 

















































































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MANHANDLED 169 

rebuff. “Then where do you want to go from 
here?” 

“I want to go home,” she proclaimed, puzzled by 
the heaviness about her heart. And Thomdyke 
took her home, with a tenderness quite new to him, 
finding her more desirable because she had been 
denied him. He even showed small concern over 
the shabbiness of the district into which she had 
so valorously piloted him. 

“We’re going to be friends, good friends,” he 
proclaimed with unexpected solemnity as he shook 
hands with her. “And to do that we’ve got to be¬ 
lieve in each other.” 

Yet it was of Bob Brandt she thought most as 
another Sunday drew near. He was companionable 
and he was without that tingling sense of peril 
which could give deeper meanings to casual words 
and movements. She could console herself, too, 
with the thought that she was giving Brandt some¬ 
thing in return for his friendship. And her color 
was high as she once more arrayed herself in her 
abbreviated raiment of brocade and chiffon and 
mounted the model-throne. 

“Chip Thomdyke tells me,” said Brandt' as he 
worked, “that you’ve been dining with him. How 
do you like him?” 

“He seems very nice.” 


170 


MANHANDLED 


“Yes, that’s the dangerous part of it,” asserted 
Brandt, still bent over his palette. “You under¬ 
stand, of course, that he’s a married man?” 

Tess’s heart tightened. It even took an effort to 
hide the sudden sense of betrayal that possessed her. 
Life, after all, had so many roads that led nowhere. 

“He never mentioned his wife,” said the stricken¬ 
eyed girl on the model-throne. 

1 “He wouldn’t,” was Brandt’s rather grim retort. 

“You don’t like him,” proclaimed Tess, on the 
defensive. 

“It’s more that I don’t want you to,” asserted the 
man at the easel. “As I’ve told you before, you’re 
a trifle different from the rest.” 

“How am I different?” she asked. 

“You’ve got judgment,” he disappointed her by 
saying. 

“Then you’d advise me not to motor out to West- 
bury with Chip Thorndyke?” she asked in a spirit 
of retaliation. 

, “That’s for you to decide,” was all he would ad¬ 
mit. Then he remained silent for a minute or two. 
“By the way, what do they pay you at the store?” 

“Eighteen dollars a week,” admitted Tess. 
“.Why?” 

“Can you get along on that?” he impersonally 
inquired. 


MANHANDLED 


171 

“Why?” repeated the girl. 

“Because I can nail down a jobber's order for 
hand-painted place-cards at six dollars a dozen. 
They’d have to be humorous and original in design, 
of course, though they could be duplicated in every 
series of fifty. I thought, from what I saw of your 
line-work, you’d possibly like to tackle a thing like 
that. Would you?” 

“I’d love to!” she cried. And the weight was 
already gone from her heart. 

“A girl needs clothes and things,” said Brandt 
with a vague gesture. “You could almost double 
your store money, if you really worked. Is the 
room where you live big enough for that sort of 
thing?” 

Tess shook her head. 

“It’s a cubby-hole of a second-floor bedroom,” 
she dolorously admitted. 

“Then I could spare you a comer of this work¬ 
room of mine,” he casually announced. “I’ll dig 
out some water-colors and let you have that table 
there. And I suppose I’d better have another, pass¬ 
key cut, for there’ll be plenty of evenings when I’m 
not around.” 

“Then it wouldn’t be so nice,” she promptly and 
significantly asserted. 

“Save that for Chip Thomdyke,” was his brusk 


172 


MANHANDLED 


retort. “This is a business arrangement and if you’re 
going to enter into it you’ve got to do it in a busi¬ 
ness way.” 

Her color deepened. 

“I’ll try not to disappoint you,” she said in a 
yoice so constrained that he looked sharply at her. 

“Oh, hell, don’t imagine I’m not human,” he 
broke out. He was pacing the floor by this time. 
“I’m no better than the rest of them. Only I’m a 
little more cowardly.” 

She liked him for that speech, and she let him 
know it. 

“I’d trust you anywhere,” she said with her sober 
young eyes on his. And it was his turn to color a 
little. 

“Would you now?” he said, half in mockery. He 
flung down his brushes. “Then let’s go up to the“ 
Byzantium roof and have dinner and a fox-trot. 
I’m tired of trying to get my Egyptian dancer to 
look exultant to-day.” 

Tess enjoyed her evening on the Byzantium roof, 
though she had suffered a few pangs of conscience 
while she was donning her carefully preserved 
party-dress in her stuffy bedroom and thought of 
jjim toiling hot and alone over his greasy, baffling 
carburetor in the garage farther down-town. 

She enjoyed the dinner Brandt adroitly ordered. 


MANHANDLED 


173 

She enjoyed the music and the thought of being 
in the midst of people who looked important. But 
most of all she enjoyed the dancing. Brandt saw, 
from the first, that she danced for the sheer love 
of dancing, lightly and indefatigably, with little per¬ 
sonal thought of her partner as she floated through 
measure after measure. Her cheeks flushed and 
her eyes brightened with excitement. She was 
eager to know the name of the pearl-draped actress 
who came in late. She was equally interested in 
the claret-cheeked elderly gentleman accompanying 
the tired-eyed star who looked young only at a dis¬ 
tance. 

“That’s Luther Swett, the Wall Street banker,” 
explained Brandt in answer to her question. “He’d 
give ten millions, I suppose, to be ten years 
younger.” 

“He’s bowing to you,” Tess murmured in a voice 
that made Bob laugh. 

“The old beggar’s doing more,” muttered her 
companion. “He’s coming over here. So you’ve 
got to decide mighty quick whether you’re going to 
dance with him or not.” 

“Why shouldn’t I ?” she asked, remembering the 
casual reference to millions. 

“Well, you’ve been warned,” murmured Brandt, 
who turned to shake hands with the newcomer. 


MANHANDLED 


174 

The newcomer reminded Tess of a rubicund and 
blithe-mannered old robin, with a small shrewd eye 
in a massive face not without power. He im¬ 
pressed her, as he led her triumphantly out to the 
dancing-floor, as urbane and fatherly and just a little 
ridiculous in his pretenses toward a youth so re¬ 
gretfully lost Yet he danced amazingly well, for 
a man of his girth, and his partner was not un¬ 
conscious of the eyes bent upon her as they fox¬ 
trotted up and down the polished floor. This was 
different, she remembered, from refolding shop¬ 
worn crepe-de-chine on a basement counter. And it 
was catching at the glamour of life to have a Wall 
Street millionaire tell you that you danced like a 
wave of the sea, whatever that might mean. 

“We all deserve a bit of sparkling burgundy after 
that,” proclaimed her mellow-eyed partner. “Come 
on, Verlyna and Brandt; we’re going to wet our 
whistles.” 

The burgundy, served in coffee-cups, gave Tess 
odd tingles in her finger-tips. But it was even more 
intoxicating to find herself sitting across the table 
from Verlyna Charette, whose name flowered night¬ 
ly over Broadway in framed electric bulbs. When 
Brandt explained that Miss McGuire was a bit of 
an artist, he borrowed a pencil from the waiter and 
had her do a thumb-nail sketch of the star, which 


MANHANDLED 


175 


Luther Swett inspected with pursed-up lips and 
passed smilingly on to Miss Charette, who insisted 
on keeping it and proclaiming its maker a wonder. 

Under the influence of the festive surroundings 
and the contraband alcohol, even Brandt’s repressed 
spirits began to soar. 

“How about adjourning to my diggings to re¬ 
plenish the hootch ?” Swett proposed at length, 
with his autumnal smile directed invitingly toward 
Tess. “My car and chauffeur are outside.” 

“Better still,” Bob cut in with unaccustomed 
gaiety, “let’s whirl around to my studio and pull 
a party in a setting of art. We can get some others 
in.” 

Tess, a little flushed from the burgundy, was being 
swept along with the reckless tide. “We could 
phone Chip Thomdyke.” 

Bob hesitated. Then, “All right, though I doubt 
he’s home. And whom shall we get for him?” 

Tess’s motive was not devoid of mischief as she 
suggested Pinkie Doran. Without asking em¬ 
barrassing questions, Bob agreed, and they deserted 
Swett and his companion temporarily for tobacco- 
soaked phone booths. 

Luckily both Pinkie and Thomdyke were avail¬ 
able. To save time, it was agreed that Swett’s 
limousine was to pick up Chip, while Brandt and 


176 MANHANDLED 

the excited-eyed Tess piled into a taxi and set off 
for Pinkie. 

Once alone with her in the dark depths of the 
lurching taxi, Brandt’s eagerness for the projected 
fun seemed to cool, and he lapsed into a silence 
which Tess did not fancy. 

“Mr. Swett’s rather a dear, isn’t he?” asked the 
happy-eyed girl. 

“He’s a devastating old satyr,” Brandt retorted, 
with unexpected savagery. “And I’m sorry it’s 
happened.” 

“Sorry what happened?” she asked as she slipped 
a hand through his arm. 

“That that old scalp-hunter, should be interested 
in you.” 

“Don’t you think I’m able to take care of myself ?” 
she finally demanded. 

Brandt apparently found that question no easy 
one to answer. 

“It all depends on what you mean by taking care 
of yourself,” he explained. “Some girls seem to 
take care of themselves too carefully, if you get 
what I’m driving at. They want protection, but 
they have to pay so much for it, sometimes, that 
there’s nothing much left to protect. They want 
splendid settings for their pinched little drama of 


MANHANDLED 


*77 

pleasure, and to get that they lose the only splendid 
thing life’s given them.” 

She leaned back, slightly chilled by that pro¬ 
nouncement. 

“And do you think I’m that small and selfish?” 
she found the courage to ask. 

“I think you’re young and impressionable,” he 
countered. “And I’d hate to see this city soil your 
freshness.” 

“Isn’t that something that goes anyway?” she 
said with a self-defensive little laugh. 

“Well, it doesn’t help any to have it too freely 
handled. It’s like those things you sell down in 
Thomdyke’s. It gets soiled and shoddy and second¬ 
hand.” 

, She withdraw her hand from his arm. 

“But is that any worse,” she demanded, “than 
staying on the shelf?” 

“You never will,” he evaded. He was able to- 
laugh a little at the note of fierceness in her voice. 

“Why do you say that?” she asked, with the 
glamour gone from her day. 

“Because you’re so darned adorable,” was his 
altogether unsatisfactory reply. And her heart 
lightened a little as he recaptured her hand and 
thrust it in under his elbow. 


MANHANDLED 


178 

They rode on in a companionable silence for sev¬ 
eral minutes. 

“It’s hard to know, isn’t it, what really helps us 
in this muddle called life?” Brandt meditated aloud. 

“Why do you say that?” asked Tess as a small 
shiver of weariness went through her body. Her 
day and the night so far had been rather long and 
strenuous. 

“Well, take you and those paintings of mine,” 
pursued the man at her side. “If it hadn’t been; 
for you I’d never have done over my Ballet Dancer. 
I got you at just the right moment for that. I 
captured you when you still had all the innocent 
freshness of youth in your body.” 

“And do you think I’ve lost that?” demanded 
the girl. 

“You’ve got poise in your head instead, and 
you’re learning life isn’t all sunshine. That’s what 
I tried to get in my figure of Comedy —laughter 
with the hint of a tear behind it. And now that’s 
off the skids I want to tackle Tragedy, the maiden 
with the heart and head bowed down. But I don’t 
see how you’re going to help me much with that 
picture.” ; 

“Why not ?” she asked, wondering a little at the 
wintriness of his laugh. 

Because you’re too dog-goned triumphant just 


MANHANDLED' 


•i 79 

at present,” He said with an effort at flippancy. “For 
that, my dear, I’d have to get you when somebody’s 
just kicked your apple-cart over!” 

Her laugh was short but self-defensive. 

“But I don’t intend to have that happen,” she 
announced. Then, as the taxi swerved in toward 
the curb and came to a screaming stop, she regained 
her blithe spirits and cried, “Here’s Pinkie’s man¬ 
sion. Better let me dash up and get her. Bob. 
You’d break your neck on those awful stairs!” 

Brandt, 'from the Hooded gloom of the taxi, 
failed to answer her. He was thinking, not of the 
words from her lips, but of the lips themselves. 


CHAPTER XIII 


W HEN they arrived at the rather dingy Krftwn- 
stone front in which Brandt's studid was 
located, Swett’s shiny limousine was already parked 
at the curb. He and Verlyna embarked as the taxi 
eased up in the rear of the statelier car, and the 
excited Pinkie, who had donned her gaudiest even¬ 
ing wrap and had been dissuaded from spending a 
half-hour curling her fluffy hair anew only on the 
threat of being deserted, gasped audibly at being 
presented to the opulent millionaire and his famous 
companion. Then the quartette scurried up the nar¬ 
row, musty stairs to Brandt's apartment 

On the first landing, Brandt, who had by this 
time recovered the somewhat disturbing, devil-may- 
care look in his deep black eyes with which he had 
first proposed the party, turned to Tess, pointed to 
a door and explained, “Here's where Dale James 
and Ann Patterson, the Follies dancers, hang out. 
Shall I ask them up if they’re in?" 

“That would be nice," she enthused, impressed 
at the offhand manner in .which he bandied about 
such celebrated names. 

He pounded on the door and was almost at once 
1180 


MANHANDLED 


181 


rewarded by seeing it open a bit. A dark, meriy 
little feminine face in a setting of dusky bobbed 
curls peered out inquiringly. 

“I’m giving a party, Ann,” Bob saluted her care¬ 
lessly. “You and Dale dash up! an 3 join us.” 

“I’ll see, Bob,” she answered and, turning, said 
something rapidly to an invisible person inside the 
room. A male voice rumbled, and she turned 
brightly to Brandt and Tess and said, “We’re tired 
and -we’re not dressed, but if you don’t mind a 
doddering old married couple sitting around and 
watching the fun, we’ll be up in a few minutes.” 

“Righto,” from Brandt, and taking Tess’s arm he 
piloted her rapidly the rest of the journey, two steps 
at a time. “They’re really married, you know,” 
he commented, almost breathless from the rollick¬ 
ing pace yet seeming to feel that he ought to ex¬ 
plain. “But of course they’re neither doddering nor 
ancient. She’s twenty and he’s about five years 
older. Good scouts, both of 'them.” 

Tess felt suddenly that she too ought to produce 
somebody famous. Besides, Chip was coming, and 
she might as well have her whole gang present. 

“I know a rather interesting man named Garret- 
son,” she proposed. “May I phone him? He lives 
right near here.” 

“Who? Garretson, the jitney George Moore? 


MANHANDLED 


.182! 

Sure—go ahead.” If she had hoped to Impress this 
moody artist, she hadn’t succeeded. 

Brandt turned the key in the lock and with a 
flourish bade his guests enter. Swett and Verlyna, 
who had evidently expected something much more 
pretentious than this glorified paint-shop, sniffed 
perceptibly, and the Broadway star seated herself' 
gingerly in the apartment’s best chair, which showed 
visible signs of requiring dusting and reupholstering. 

But Pinkie was in her glory. 

“Say, where does a rib doll herself up ’round these 
diggings?” she blithely demanded. 

“Show her the way into my bedroom,” said 
Brandt, and Tess wondered if his intentions weren’t 
slightly malicious. She had only been in his box¬ 
like sleeping compartment once in her life, when he 
had asked her to view a rare painting, an original 
of Whistler’s that hung on the wall there. 

Brandt’s nonchalant instructions had their effect 
upon Pinkie, for in the midst of her operations with 
lip-rouge and mascaro, she turned to Tess curiously 
and asked, “Are you and this art guy extra clubby?” 

“Oh, we’re fairly friendly. I pose for him, and 
he’s giving me art-lessons.”' 

“Pose?, Well, all I can say, dearie, is to repeat 
my pet gem of wisdom: always keep ’em guessin’. 


■MANHANDLED 


183 

and always leave ’em wonderin’ when you gurgle 
good night.” 

“Don’t worry, Pinkie, he’s been very nice to me, 
but I’m not nuts over him,” retorted Tess. She 
wondered why she wished Jim could have been 
there to hear that declaration. 

During Pinkie’s elaborate ceremony upon the altar 
of beauty, Tess overheard two interruptions amid 
the babble in the next room and judged correctly 
that the first was the dancers from the floor below 
and second was Chip Thorndyke. She slipped out 
of the bedroom and into the little alcove where the 
telephone rested. 

“Sunday is my working night,” came Garretson’s 
slow, world-weary voice to her. “But if that shin¬ 
dig is really as promising as you paint it, I’ll chuck 
work and come over.” 

When, a few minutes later, Pinkie and Tess ap¬ 
peared in the studio, Brandt and Swett were escort¬ 
ing the cocktails around'. It was raw stuff, and 
Tess’s throat tingled as she tilted the slender glass, 

“These lads mix ’em strong,” pronounced Pinkie, 
but she absorbed the vitriolic mixture without 
wincing, and even accepted a re-fill. 

“Introduce me to your little blonde friend,” came 
the amused voice of [Thorndyke at Tess’s elbow. 


MANHANDLED 


184 

And 'despite the nudge and quick, meaning glance 
from Pinkie, Tess told the truth. 

“This is Pinkie Doran, Miss Thirty-Eight in 
Thomdyke's De Luxe Shop.” 

“Really?” Chip raised his narrow eyebrows. 
“We’re certainly picking them right at the store 
these days. How about a fox-trot. Pinkie?” And 
Tess was left looking at the slightly mocking glance 
in his circled eyes as he danced, closely locked, away 
with the ecstatic Pinkie to the strains of Brandt’s 
battered baby-grand being pounded lustily and ex¬ 
pertly by Dale James. 

But she did not have to stand long alone, lot 
somebody outside was beating the old-fashioned 
knocker and, suspecting who he was, Tess fluttered 
over to the threshold and opened the door upon the 
narrow blinking face of Carl Garretson. Brandt, 
dancing by with Ann Patterson, loosed his hold upon 
her trim little back, to be introduced. Artist, 
author, star dancer—Tess was quite proud to be 
one of this quartette. She was surely getting on. 

“A nice, quiet little assemblage of youth, talent 
and alcohol, devoted to the worship of the arts,” 
commented Garretson, with a paternally familiar 
pat upon Tess’s back. She did not resent that pat 
because it so evidently annoyed Brandt. She won¬ 
dered, indeed, if that was not the reason why, when 


MANHANDLED 


185 

the dancing was renewed, she found Bob fox-trot¬ 
ting with her instead of Ann Patterson, who was 
doing the best she could with the clumsy-footed 
Garretson. 

‘Tm familiar with your stuff,” Garretson re¬ 
marked to Bob, after delivering Ann, bruised but 
laughing, into the charge of her sleek-haired, good- 
looking husband. “With the exception of that era zy 
one you had in the Independent Artists' show at 
the Astor, it's rather good.” 

“Thanks awfully,” returned Brandt rather curtly. 
“Personally I thought my Astor exhibit was the 
best thing that I’d ever done in that particular 
metier.” 

“Oh, undoubtedly,” contended the other. “But 
why not stick to a sane metier?, After all, you 
know Gertrude Stein may be a genius, but who the 
devil knows it, since nobody can make sense of 
her stuff?” 

And here followed a highly technical discussion, 
not assisted at all in its clarity by the bad alcohol 
which the two philosophers had just consumed. 
Tess listened, all ears. But she could glean no- 
glimmer of sense from it. 

“By the way,” observed Garretson, coming out 
of the fog at last, “what are you doing with this 
little bundle of aspiring youth? I understand she’s 


186 MANHANDLED 

the model for something new you’re concocting on 
canvas.” 

Brandt described, rather petulantly, the four- 
panel series he was painting with Tess. It was 
obvious he did not fancy this lanky writer of best¬ 
sellers. Tess had discovered, before, Bob’s intoler¬ 
ance of any one who ventured a flippant attitude 
toward his work, and he could not be expected to 
strike a sympathetic chord with Garretson, who held 
his own source of dollars so lightly. 

‘Well, don’t exhaust all the material in her,” 
drawled Garretson. ‘‘I want to use some parts of 
her in my next novel. I discovered her for the 
realm of art, you must admit.” 

“Are you really putting me into a novel?” asked 
Tess, with a tingle she could not altogether control, 
i “It’s nothing but a title as yet.” 

“And what is the title?” 

For the first time, it seemed to her, he looked at 
her seriously. “Thin Ice ” he said shortly, and 
walked away. 

She frowned and gazed after his narrow retreat¬ 
ing back with the spindly shoulder-blades denting 
his tailor s handicraft. Was there any more signifi¬ 
cance in his answer than the fact that it was a 
good title with which to sell books? She caught 
her upper lip with her even white teeth and glanced 


MANHANDLED 187 

up inquiringly at the lean face of Brandt for an 
explanation. 

“Don’t mind him,” snapped Bob. “He’s anemic, 
and somewhat of a bore besides. Let’s get another 
drink.” 

The party gained momentum. Even Verlyna 
Charette was unbending and, sharing the piano- 
bench, chatting animatedly with Dale James. She 
consented to sing, later on, and delivered the hit 
of her current show in a mellow contralto. James 
had brought his famous mandolin along and as an 
encore accompanied Verlyna in several jazzified ren¬ 
ditions of songs he had himself composed. 

Then, with an intermission of another round of 
cocktails, Dale and Ann reproduced their bit from 
the Follies to the tune of Bring Those Red Lips 
Back to Me, the song all New York was whistling 
that fall, with Dale flashing his nimble white fingers 
over the ivory-inlaid instrument and Ann twinkling 
her masterpieces of feet and legs in the graceful 
abandon of a graceful, wild thing from the white 
sands of Waikiki. Flashing eyes, tumbling hair, 
all the mad exuberance of youth poured into the 
rippling staccato of the dance. 

Tess, sitting between Brandt and Thomdyke on 
the divan and watching them, found it hard to 
keep her own feet still. Unconsciously her own 


188 


MANHANDLED 


slim and supple body imitated the movements of 
the professional, until Bob and Chip, with a know¬ 
ing smile over her head, sat watching her instead 
of Ann. 

With the studio swept by the crashing unison of 
applause, Ann flung herself exhausted into a rickety 
Morris chair. From then on the party gained even 
more frantic speed. Pinkie, far giddier than nor¬ 
mal under her tongue-loosening surplusage of cock¬ 
tails, was probably the most hilarious person in the 
smoke-fogged studio. James applied himself to the 
piano again and tore off a “blues” that was all the 
rage in the Harlem dinge belt. The dancing be¬ 
came general, but somewhat more rowdy than be¬ 
fore. 

Chip, dancing with Tess, began pouring maudlin 
endearments into her ear and embracing her so 
earnestly that she finally drew away and protested 
a bit unsteadily, “Strangle-holds are barred, old 
dear.” 

“Is that so?” he belligerently retorted. But he 
obediently loosened his clasp. At the end of the 
dance, however, he put her in her place by saying, 
“Got to find another partner. You wouldn’t be nice 
to me. Where’s Pinkie ? Whe-e-r-r-re’s Pinkie ? 
Oh, there you are, my, dear.” He bowed low and 
ridiculously to Tess, nearly losing his balance, and 


MANHANDLED 189 

pursuing an uneven course across the floor, almost 
fell into the arms of the welcoming Pinkie. 

Pinkie had by this time arrived at the stage where 
she wanted to break things. Out of the corner of 
her eye Tess, dancing with the sleepy-eyed Garret- 
son now, glanced over at Brandt and observed the 
grim look of the artist, perhaps the soberest person 
in the room, as Pinkie, dancing by, with a shriek 
and a flourish swept the casket off the hemleted 
figure of the man in armor in the comer of the 
studio. Pinkie's gallant and somewhat intoxicated 
partner, Chip, stopped at once, bowed' gravely to 
the armored figure and caught the casket, bobbing 
crazily around the floor, in his hand. Then, in¬ 
stead of replacing it, he set it upon his own head 
and, bowing to Pinkie, announced, “Sir Galahad, in 
person, positively, at your service, lady.” 

Pinkie considered this funny and rendered 
raucous homage to Chip's wit. They danced 1 
crazily on. But only for a minute, for, catching 
sight of Tess’s Ballet Dancer costume flung care¬ 
lessly over the top of the model’s screen, Pinkie 
snatched it off in passing and draped it around her. 

“Costume party!” she cried to the others. “Let's 
make it a costume party. I've got mine. I'm 
Madame Pay-lowa, the well-known ballyhoo dancer, 
and some kid, too!” 


190 


MANHANDLED 


“Sir Galahad will say you are/’ agreed Chip, and 
handed her a resounding kiss. 

The others took up the cry at once, and Brandt, 
to save his workshop from being pulled apart, hur¬ 
ried to his costume-trunk and, flinging its contents 
on the floor, shouted, “Plenty of stuff for every¬ 
body. Grab it. First come, first served.” 

“Come on,” cried Tess excitedly to the slow- 
moving Garretson. 

“At this point the party gets rough,” he com¬ 
mented. 

“Not rough—just inter-resting,” she returned, 
disturbed to discover her tongue was doing funny 
things when she tried to pronounce words of more 
than two syllables. 

“The two words are so often synonymous,” ex¬ 
plained Garretson. 

They joined the hilarious, scrambling crowd upon 
the floor and out of the welter Tess drew a dusty 
French costume with high collar and train such as 
used to be associated with Sarah Bernhardt, though 
the flimsy material as boldly splashed ith con¬ 
ventional red roses. 

“Here’s the prize of them all,” she announced to 
Garretson, blowing her disheveled hair out of her 
eyes and fleeing with her treasure into Brandt’s 
bedroom. 


MANHANDLED 


191 

Deftly and swiftly Tess yanked her hair back 
smooth against her skull, donned the hastily-found 
costume, seized the plumed fan that went with it, 
and hurried out to rejoin the party. 

“Good lord, what have we here?” laughed Garret- 
son, who had wrapped Brandt’s flowered dressing- 
gown athwart his thin shoulder and looked like a 
somewhat emanciated cavalier of Charles II’s time. 

“Name me and you can have me,” frivoled Tess. 

Brandt, coming up to them in the gay velvet smock 
and tam-o’-shanter he had worn at the Fakirs’ Ball, 
heard her answer and ventured, “You look like my 
old friend, Princess Tchupwupska, cousin to the 
custodian of the late Czarina’s favorite blood¬ 
hounds.” 

“My dear fellow,” Tess rippled. “How did you 
ever recognize me so far from home?” 

“By the costume, dear lady. It is the one you 
wore at Peter the Great’s inaugural, is it not?” 

“Good old Peter,” Tess murmured, “how is he 
getting on?” 

“Let’s dance,” interrupted Brandt, dropping the 
nonsense. And they did. Past Pinkie, forced to 
seek haven against the whirligig within her head 
on the divan, but still laughing, while Chip bent 
over her in alcoholic solicitude. Past Luther Swett, 
looking more absurd than ever in a costume that 


MANHANDLED 


19*2 

made him resemble the cover-design of a box of 
Turkish cigarettes, and Verlyna in the role of Fa¬ 
tima. Past Dale James, who had simply removed 
his coat and tucked his sport-shirt collar in, and 
past Ann, alluringly Spanish and incredibly small in 
a borrowed flowered mantilla. 

And then Tess, laughing and exchanging shrill 
and rather thick-tongued banter with them all, was 
aware that Brandt was saying, “I wish you wouldn’t 
get so friendly with Garretson and Thorndyke. 
They’re wildcats with the women, you know.” 

“Old Man Gloom!” she chided, leaning on him 
a little for support. “Old Rain-maker!” 

“Well, I mean it.” His voice was tired and 
harsh. 

“That’s a funny thing,” she chuckled. “Carl 
and Chip said the same about you, not half an 
hour ago.” 

Before he could carry the matter further, the 
sound of somebody vibrating the knocker on the 
studio-door came to them. 

“My God, the cops,” breathed Brandt, in simulat¬ 
ed alarm. “Or some crab to kick about the noise. 
Be quiet, you people, a second.” 

He slid over to the door and gingerly opened it 
a crack. Holding colloquy with a male voice out¬ 
side, he presently opened the door wide, and a 


MANHANDLED 


193 


foreign-looking gentleman in evening clothes and 
sleek blond pompadour and a small pale mustache 
with fiercely waxed ends walked smilingly in. He 
had, the newcomer explained with a sudden rush of 
words to the lips and a strong accent, been passing 
to his own apartment across the hall, had been lured 
by the hilarity in his neighbor’s lodging and had 
ventured to inflict himself upon them. 

“Sure—certainly,” Brandt broke in. “Don’t 
apologize.” And turning to Tess, he droned grave¬ 
ly, “Princess Tchupwupska, may I present my good 
friend and neighbor, Monsieur Arno Ricard?” 

Mr. Ricard’s small blue eyes twinkled and, enter¬ 
ing at once into the spirit of the fun, he bowed, 
lifted her hand lightly with his and touched it to 
his lips. At the same time he shot her a glance 
out of his rather bold eyes that Tess, in her present 
state, did not get. 

“Have I not met you somewhere before. Your 
Highness?” he asked. 

“Maybe,” she murmured, affecting an imitation 
of princessly hauteur. 

“Budapest?” 

“Come again!” 

“Petrograd ?” 

“Wrong once more!” 

“Where could it have been, then?” 


194 


MANHANDLED 


“Coney Island, I guess,” she answered pertly, and 
Started to walk away. 

“Perhaps it was last Friday at noon on Fifth 
Avenue. You lunched in Schrafft’s, riest-ce pas?” 

“Gosh, are you a mind-reader?” she inquired im¬ 
pertinently, surveying him cockily. She was not 
quite herself that night, and she knew it. 

“No, but I have an eye for color and beauty. I 
need it in my business.” 

“Well, business now is to dance or drink. Come 
on.” She wondered why her ears were ringing 
as she dragged him to the punchbowl. 

There she managed to lose him in the crowd and 
the smoke, for somehow she instinctively felt safer 
with Brandt than with this polished continental, 
whom she could not see with perfect distinctness 
because her eyes persisted in watering and wavering. 

“He owns Maison Ricard, the big fashionable 
modiste shop on Fifth Avenue,” Brandt explained 
amid the din to Tess. “He lives across the hall 
and isn’t such a bad scout, though you might call 
him the Anatole of Murray Hill, if you get what 
I mean. And he makes money enough from the 
plutocratic clientele he serves. Inspection of gowns 
only by appointment and all that sort of junk. He 
has the real Rolls-Royce trade of New York.” 

Tess noticed off and on during the next and last 


MANHANDLED 


195 

half-hour of the party that the perfumed Ricard, 
with his funny spiked mustache, was regarding her 
a trifle too frequently and a trifle too intently for 
a chance acquaintance. When Brandt arose from 
the divan where they were sitting to bid good night 
to Dale James and Ann Patterson, Ricard came 
over and slipped down beside her. 

“Say,” she began at once with bold and irritated 
vehemence, “what is there funny about me, aside 
from my costume?” 

“Nothing, Princess, I assure you.” 

“Then why are you looking at me all the time? 
I don’t altogether cotton to it” 

“I am wondering whether you would come to 
my office, say to-morrow noon, and talk over some¬ 
thing I think may interest you.” 

“Interest me? Gowns?” 

“In a way.” 

“Have you got something nifty for about four 
ninety-eight?” she mocked, marveling at her own 
loose-jointed gaiety. 

“It’s something entirely different from that. Will 
you come?” 

“I’ll think it over—if I remember it.” 

And she arose, as Luther Swett ambled over, and 
accepted his offer to take her home in his limousine 
with himself and Verlyna. 


196 


MANHANDLED 


Five minutes later she was bidding Bob and the 
others an unsteady good night and wondering why 
her eyes would hardly stay open. 

“Monday at noon then,” were Ricard’s last 
words, delivered with a knowing look. 

“Maybe—can’t tell,” she smiled up sleepily and a 
bit impudently from the stairs. 


CHAPTER XIV 


£ £ FTER that swell party last night it’s 



sure sourin’ my disposition,” proclaimed 


Pinkie Doran wearily the next morning, “tryin’ to 
be a pur fee’ lady to these lonjery hounds. It’s more 
like presidin’ over a cat-fight than a big-store 
counter. Yes, maddum, the goods is color fast. 
No wonder you kicked to Moysey about bein’ kept 
down here below the water-line. But don’t fall for 
that line o’ his about likin’ you so much he’s goin’ 
to keep you in his own little nest. He’s sore because 
you went over his head and made that holler to Chip 
Thorndyke. It ain’t done, dearie. And I miss my 
guess if it don’t anchor you in this subway of ours 
until the spring flowers is bloomin’ again.” 

Tess put a hand to her trembling temples, scarcely 
hearing Pinkie as she rambled on. 

“No, maddum, nothin’ on approval and no ex¬ 
changes. We may be cellar-rats, Miss McGuire, but 
we’ve sure gotta live. I may lose tone when I park 
my lid in the locker every momin’ but I can still step 
out at night. And say, birdie, how about cornin’ 
over to the Hokey-Pokey dance at Durkin’s Hall to- 


197 


MANHANDLED 


198 

night? There’ll be a bunch o’ the up-stairs boys 
and some mean jazz breakin’ loose.” 

Tess’s eyes were thoughtful as she refolded a 
charmeuse petticoat. The paths of her aspiration 
did not lead toward Durkin’s Hall and a crowd of 
rowdy store-clerks. She remembered that three 
men last week had sent her ridiculously large boxes 
of American Beauties and that the next day she was 
to dine with Carl Garretson at the Algonquin 
Round-Table. It seemed to count more, in some 
way, to go into places where the plush ropes were 
solemnly put down and your friend should call the 
head-waiter by his first name. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but Fve got to stay in and 
do some sewing to-night.” 

Pinkie nodded her approval. 

“You’re right, kid. A girl’s gotta queen up, no 
matter what it costs. And it’s some battle for an 
eighteen-a-weeker to rattle in like a three-year-old 
tin Lizzie in a coat o’ pipe-enamel!” 

If there was a barb in Pinkie’s proclamation, 
Tess’s head ached too severely to resent it. Chip 1 
Thomdyke, she noticed, had not made his usual 
morning appearance in the basement. As noon 
neared, she decided that she had no appetite for 
lunch, and then there flashed upon her the memory 


'MANHANDLED 


199 

of Amo Ricard’s invitation to call around and see 
him that day. 

The Maison Ricard, she knew, was only five or 
six blocks up the avenue from Thomdyke’s. On 
the whole, she decided, she would go. The walk in 
the crisp October air would do her good, and she 
would at least have the opportunity of seeing what 
was behind those exquisitely draped windows and 
dull bronze doors. Moreover, she was curious as 
to what he wanted. So she declined Pinkie’s pro¬ 
posal to “jump over to Child’s for a stack of wheats” 
and, donning her last year’s autumn hat and coat, 
sallied forth upon the crowded sidewalk. 

Tess no longer regarded the vista of motor- 
thronged Fifth Avenue with the look of fresh won¬ 
der that had been hers on that memorable morning 
when she stood down in front of the Waldorf and 
swept up the broad colorful expanse of Murray Hill 
with eager unspoiled eyes. She “belonged” now. 
Familiarity had bred not contempt, but indifference. 
And there was little opportunity for standing still 
and romancing amidst that scurrying tide of tempo¬ 
rarily released shopgirls and white-collar men, of 
bargain-seeking dowagers in search of lunch at the 
hotels and the innumerable table d'hote tearooms, of 
automat-bound office-boys and chattering matinee- 


200 MANHANDLED 

ing debutantes eddying about her and jostling 
against her. 

In front of the Maison Ricard, the tall door-at¬ 
tendant in the chin-high pale blue uniform accepted 
doubtfully her announcement that she had an ap¬ 
pointment with Monsieur Ricard and granted her 
grudging entrance. The small, softly carpeted pass¬ 
ageway within led to a large, high-ceilinged oval 
room hung with dignified tapestries and devoid of 
every mark of a place where things were sold. 
Gracefully spindled chairs, upholstered in light blue, 
clustered about, but the gown-mart was apparently 
deserted. Tess wondered if all the inmates were 
out lunching at the Ritz. For an instant she had a 
panicky feeling that she was venturing beyond her 
depth and might have turned and departed had not 
signs of life in the shape of a courtly middle-aged 
matron, wearing a shiny silk gown and looking at 
least a duchess, appeared seemingly from nowhere 
and, advancing swimmingly upon her, inquired, 
“Mademoiselle wishes—?” 

Tess announced again her engagement with Mon¬ 
sieur Ricard, and the duchess, departing and return¬ 
ing in a few minutes, admitted, as if it had been 
quite a blow to her, that Monsieur Ricard would 
see her at once. She was guided to an unobtrusive 
mahogany door and, when it was opened, discovered 


MANHANDLED 


201 


herself within a luxuriantly large office with a broad 
flat-topped mahogany desk at one end, behind which 
the perfumed Frenchman now arose smilingly and 
waved her to a chair beside him. 

“I was afraid you had not remembered our ap¬ 
pointment,he began as they both sat down. 

“Oh, I wasn’t that far gone,” she laughed, gain¬ 
ing courage by the second. She would have hated 
to admit to him the truth, that Bob’s party marked 
the first time in her life she had quaffed enough 
liquor to feel a kick from it. 

“Mr. Brandt tells me,” he resumed, and his voice 
strangely lost most of its accent and became busi¬ 
nesslike, “that you are a salesgirl in a department- 
store, but that you are looking for something better.” 

She nodded. 

“When I saw you on the avenue last week, Miss 
McGuire,” he went on, “I was struck by your beauty 
and poise, and I realized further in Brandt’s studio 
last night that you were a girl of unusual talents, 
something of an actress and able to carry off a situa¬ 
tion with dignity and e’clat. It occurred to me that 
I might have something here to offer a young lady 
like that.” 

She did not, she decided, fancy the hard, selfish 
and sensual look in the eyes of this immaculately 
attired male-modiste. But his words interested her. 


202 


MANHANDLED 


“My establishment, as you probably know,” he 
lowered his voice, “caters to he most exclusive soci¬ 
ety trade. My patrons are ennuied rich ladies. In 
the principal modiste-shops of Paris to-day, as you 
may have heard, the latest sensation is being fur¬ 
nished by expatriated ladies of the Russian nobility 
who are working as mannequins for a living. So 
far none of them seems to have drifted here. But 
I am not unaware of the possibilities there would be, 
in an advertising way, if a Russian princess, for in¬ 
stance, should become attached .to the Maison Ric- 
ard. My patrons are thrill-seekers. They would 
love it.” 

I number very few ladies of royal blood among 
my acquaintances,” Tess smiled. 

“I know one,” he countered. “Princess Tchup- 
wupska.” 

“Oh—that.” 

“Precisely. I think you took her off to perfec¬ 
tion. I am sure, moreover, that you could deceive 
my not too shrewd patrons completely. Here is my 
proposition: Enter my employ, let me costume you 
for the role. I shall introduce you as a Russian 
princess, impoverished and forced to flee her 
country. You will simply be your own beautiful 
self, pour tea for my patrons from a samovar, and 
play your role. What do you say ?” 


MANHANDLED 


203 


Tess was confused by this unexpected and appar¬ 
ently ridiculous proposition. She stared at him, 
perplexed. But there was something alluring about 
it. It appealed to her actress-blood, to her desire 
to become a part of this wealthy, artistic world of 
soft fabrics and exclusive designs, to her craving for 
excitement with a little element of danger in it. 

Calming herself, she asked, “But, after all, what 
is there in such an unusual position for me ? Where 
would it take me?” 

“Well,” he shrugged. “Seventy-five dollars a 
week, for one thing. And Brandt tells me you are 
ambitious to succeed in art, that he is coaching you. 
I should be glad to add dress-designing and the 
study of the exclusive creations for which the Mai- 
son Ricard enjoys a reputation to your education.” 

Tess’s beleagured head was throbbing more pain¬ 
fully than ever. “If you give me a day or two to 
think it over,” she faltered, though she was quite 
sure her answer was going to be in the affirma¬ 
tive. 

“Assuredly,” he replied, and stood up, signifying 
the end of the interview. She wished he had not 
placed his fat, over-manicured hand upon her 
shoulder. “Telephone me to-morrow or next day. 
Favorably, I trust, Princess.” Was there a mock¬ 
ing light in those shrewd eyes ? 


204 


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He saw her to the outer door of the shop, and she 
walked back to Thorndyke’s in a daze. 

She was staying at home that night to transform 
by the sputtering gaslight the chinchilla of her old 
Marysville muff into dress-edgings. And Jim had 
promised to bring down a razor-blade and help her 
cut the best of the fur into strips. 

But Jim, when he brought down his blade that 
evening, was not as companionable as Tess had 
hoped to find him. He sat with his morose and 
clouded eyes fixed on her face as she deftly plied 
her needle back and forth. 

“You seem quiet, Jim,” she said as she looked'up 
from her work. 

“I guess I’m not the one who’s changed,” was his 
slightly delayed retort. 

“Then you think I am?” she asked, as she shook 
out her stock-model velvet frock and' inspected the 
enriching chinchilla about its hem. 

“You used to be interested in something besides 
clothes,” he accused, his hostile eye on the divorcing 
black velvet she held up between them. 

“But clothes seem to mean so much, in our 
world,” she reminded him. 

“Especially when you’re out with the high-roll¬ 
ers,” he amended. 

“Is that an attack on my friends?” she asked. 


MANHANDLED 205 

“On the friends who may some time help you as well 
as me?” 

“I don’t want their help,” flung back the other, 
“What I’d attack is their character. And some day 
you’ll wake up and find you can’t play with pitch 
without getting your fingers blackened.” 

Her effort to remain patient was obvious. 

“But I’m not playing with pitch, as you put it,” 
she quietly contended. “All I’m trying to do is to 
get something out of life, to get out of this awful 
hole and a store-basement.” 

“You’re trying to get too much out of life,” was 
his resentful retort “This town’s gone to your 
head and you’re hitching on to anything that will 
bring you a bigger dose of it.” 

“Then what do you want me to do?” she asked 
with a dangerous coolness. 

“I want to see you get down to earth again,” he 
said with a heat that did not appear reasonable. 

“Well, unkindness will never bring me there,” 
she reminded him, studying his face with her nar¬ 
rowed eyes. 

“Sometimes treating ’em rough is good for ’em,” 
he replied with the semblance of a smile, and there 
was such a heart-hungry look in his tired eyes that 
she almost relented and nearly drew his tousled head 
into her arms. But she was still riding high upon 


206 


MANHANDLED 


the crest of the wdve of excitement born in the Mai- 
son Ricard that noon, and she was not above har¬ 
vesting a thrill from the shock she knew her news 
would give Jim. 

“If you’ll be a real good boy, Jimsy,” she began 
with attempted gaiety and bestowing upon him the 
nickname that always made him frown, “I’ll spill 
a piece of real news to you.” 

“If it isn’t about Brandt or Thomdyke or Garret- 
son—shoot,” he grimly answered. 

And she related the story of her proffered new 
job, from her first meeting with Ricard to the 
presentation of his proposal. When she had finished 
she asked triumphantly, “Now, what do you think 
of that for the late instructress of the Marysville 
kindergarten ?” 

“I think you’re a nut to try it,” he snapped harsh¬ 
ly back at her. “And if that’s the best you can do 
you’d better try teaching again.” Then, seeing the 
angry storm-clouds gathering in her eyes, he added 
more gently: Listen, Tess, you won’t get away 
with that. You’re bound to get caught and hit the 
earth with an awful wallop.” 

“Jim, you’re not being just in this,” she con¬ 
tended. “Will you tell me what the successes in 
this town are founded on? As I begin to see it, 
they’re founded on bluff. It’s the best window- 


MANHANDLED 


207 


dresser that gets by. Ten chances to one your boss 
is getting by on that very game. I know mine is. 
The mayor probably is. The lawyers and bankers 
and swells and business men certainly are. So, why 
shouldn’t I do my little share of it?” 

Jim studied her with clouded eyes. 

“Because you’re too damned honest to get away 
with it,” he suddenly declared. Then he left his 
own chair and crossed to hers, slipping his arm 
around her as he pleaded: “Come on, Tess, why not 
drop all this foolishness and marry me now ? Even 
if I don’t get a nickel out of that carburetor, I’m 
making good enough money to keep us. What d’ 
you say?” 

She knew then that she loved him still, knew that 
the doubts she had had about her feelings for him 
lately were disappearing, knew that he wasn’t a sec¬ 
ond-rater, as he sometimes seemed when she was 
with Brandt and the others. She took his hard 
grease-seared hand in hers and studied it thought¬ 
fully. Then she lifted her head and said frankly. 
“No, Jim, I’m going to keep on trying. I wouldn’t 
be satisfied with what you can give me—yet. I 
may be; selfish, but it’s better that I should tell you 
how I feel about it. It’ll save us both a lot of pain.” 
And she hastily changed the subject. 

Yet she thought about what he had said to her 


208 


MANHANDLED 


much more than she would have been willing to ad¬ 
mit. She thought about it as she sat across the table 
from Carl Garretson at Leon's the next night and 
watched the listless-eyed novelist complain to the 
summoned chef that there was no Chablis in the 
bouillabaisse and that the bread ought to be Pain 
Riche in flutes. She even asked Garretson, after 
he wearily explained that he had finished up a novel 
that morning and felt like a mother who’d just 
given birth to a baby, if the modem girl couldn't 
meet men on their own ground and make it a give- 
and-take friendship without the old-fashioned com¬ 
plicating results. 

“Why worry, Little Peterkin?" parried the sad¬ 
eyed Laodicean across the table from her. “Don't 
smash your goods to kill a rat." 

“I don't quite understand that," objected Tess. 

‘Life is short, so why shadow it? We men, 
Apple-Blossom, only give good advice when we’re 
too old to set a bad example. And my idea of 
heaven would be kissing you to the sound of 
trumpets." 

“That doesn’t answer my question," persisted the 
thoughtful-eyed girl, wondering why these older 
men merely nibbled at love about the same as girls 
nibbled at chocolates. 

It s a sign of mediocrity, my dear, to nurse set- 


MANHANDLED 


209 


tied opinions on unsettled subjects,” was Garretson’s 
apathetic complaint. “And since our elixir of life 
so often turns out to be embalming fluid, let’s see if 
these Hawaiian croquettes have fresh cocoanut in 
them.” 

“You may be a man of thought,” asserted Tess. 
“But most of it seems to go below your belt-line.” 

Her companion laughed quite without enmity. 

“Yet I’ve noticed that flappers with dreamy eyes 
don’t necessarily have dreamy minds,” he said as she 
declined his proffered cigarettes. 

“You don’t think I’m hard?” she objected. 

“No, not hard,” he retorted, “but unawakened. 
The forest is too thick yet for you to see the trees. 
But you’re on your way through. And sellers in a 
brisk market don’t stop to wash mud from their 
turnips.” 

“That may be clever,” protested the other, “but it 
doesn’t mean much to me.” 

“It will, later on,” asserted the listless-eyed phi¬ 
losophizer who still refused to take her seriously. 
And she retaliated with a touch of the same flippant 
aloofness when he later held her hand in their taxi. 

She was in a seventh heaven of delight, com¬ 
pletely forgetting the tempest in her heart and head, 
as a little later in the evening she sat beside Garret- 
son far down in the theater orchestra and watched 


210 


MANHANDLED 


Jeanne Eagels enact the tempestuous role of “Sadie 
Thompson” in Rain. 

“How wrought up and perspiring they all are 
over nothing,” was Garre tson’s lazy comment upon 
the play at the end of the second act. “ ‘Home,’ 
the derelict, who just sits and drinks and fans is the 
only sensible one of the lot.” 

“He would be—to you,” she chided him, hardly 
hearing his remarks for her interest in the give-and- 
take conversation being carried on by a dark, keen¬ 
eyed little man with an inky pompadour and the 
stout fellow on the other side of him, whom Garret- 
son had spotted for her as New York’s wittiest and 
most vitriolic critic and the editor of one of the lead¬ 
ing barber-shop humorous magazines. 

“This is the seventh time they have seen the show 
together,” commented Garretson. “They come so 
they can fight about it and disturb everybody.” 

Tess tried to listen to these two Olympians unob¬ 
trusively, but the roving eye of the critic detected 
her, and she noticed, to her secret satisfaction, that 
he found her not unpleasing and commented in a 
low voice to his companion, with a short backward 
nod at her. And in a moment the latter was thrust¬ 
ing his thick neck forward and striving with comic¬ 
ally feigned naturalness to obtain a look at her. He 
too, she saw, nodded his head in approval, and she 


MANHANDLED 


211 


was quite sure that if Garretson had not been too 
indolent to leave her for the smoke he had promised 
himself, they would have spoken to her. 

Later Garretson taxied her to an exclusive supper- 
club just off Broadway, where they sat and sipped 
surreptitious cocktails amid an atmosphere of gray¬ 
haired “sugar daddies” and their young ladies, 
futuristically daubed walls, jazz expertly dispensed, 
scantily-clad cabaret artistes and incredibly expen¬ 
sive viands. Here, again, many a sophisticated male 
glance of admiration was directed her way. And 
the girl was not as oblivious to them as she pre¬ 
tended. 

But so brazen were some of these glances that 
even Garretson said, at last, not without a note of 
annoyance: “Too bad all the pirates didn’t perish 
with the Spanish Main. And I’m not crazy about 
this ‘parader’ role, at least not with a pin-feather 
beauty with the bloom still on. You’ve got them 
guessing. And the life of an Adirondack doe dur¬ 
ing the hunting-season is a flowery bed of ease com¬ 
pared with that of an attractive girl in these anti- 
Volstead dens.” 

Tess wondered why this shaggy novelist should 
always remain so half-hearted in his ardencies, so 
casually flippant in his admirations. 

But by the time she reached home again, Jim’s 


212 


MANHANDLED 


warning had been quite obliterated by the attractions 
of this suave world in which she had been living 
during the past nine hours. Dashing in at the last 
moment for breakfast the next morning, after he 
had long since departed, and with only the cheap 
garrulous vaudevillian, Walters, as a table-mate, she 
flew to the Subway and, punching in at Thorndyke’s 
twenty minutes late, seized the first opportunity to 
steal out to the employees’ telephone booth and tell 
Ricard that she would take the job. 

"Good,” he answered. “Come up as soon as pos¬ 
sible and I shall personally outfit you with gowns. 
You can start in Monday morning with me, if you 
please.” 


CHAPTER XV 


A SIDE from a number of annoying little com¬ 
plications, Tess regarded the beginning of 
her career at the Maison Ricard as the most im¬ 
portant step she had yet taken toward the uncertain 
pinnacle for which she had been striving since com¬ 
ing to New York. 

Her duties were neither exacting nor strenuous. 
Always a good actress, a born mimic, and possess¬ 
ing a reserve of that vague asset which New York 
termed “brass,” she was not very much afraid of 
being detected in the role which her position called 
upon her to fill. If she had any scruples about the 
falsity of her role, the excitement of it and the 
opportunity it offered of making good money away 
from Thorndyke’s stifling basement, of basking in 
the cool opulence of Ricard’s customers almost on 
an equal footing with them and of wearing the ex¬ 
clusive gowns which he furnished her free of charge, 
quieted her conscience. She would simply perform 
her duties, with a wary eye to leeward, to be sure, 
and in time seize one of the numerous opportunities 
for something better, that, she felt, would come 
213 


214 MANHANDLED 

her way in this chance-rich world in which she was 
now ensconced. 

Though Ricard, being primarily a business man, 
had been very conservative about mentioning it, she 
was quite sure, after a fortnight in her new job, that 
she was a success. The number of fashionably-clad 
ladies who alighted from their expensive cars and 
sniffingly inspected the mannequins at the Maison 
Ricard seemed to her to have been augmented since 
her arrival, and Madame Aug, the tightly-laced 
forelady who had guided her to Ricard’s office on 
the noon of their first interview, confirmed this. 

The madame, whom Tess shrewdly labeled as 
more German-Jewish than French, told her in the 
dressing-room, which she shared with the models, 
at the end of two weeks, “Ricard is no fool. He 
didn’t hire you for love. Have you seen to-day’s 
paper ?” 

Madame Aug produced the voluminous sheet 
from the closet in which her belongings hung. It 
was folded in to a center page where she pointed 
out a pencil-circled story with her overly pink finger¬ 
nail. It read: 

RUSSIAN COUNTESS POURING 
TEA IN FIFTH AVENUE SHOP 
Madam Patovska, former member of the 
Russian nobility, lending eclat to Maison 
Ricard. . . . 


MANHANDLED 


215 


“Ricard planted that,” declared Madame Aug, 
emerging from her role in the excitement. “Any¬ 
body who thinks Americans have a monopoly on 
getting stuff into the papers and fooling the boobs 
is only kidding himself.” 

Beneath her polished veneer, Madame Aug, Tess 
had already discovered, occasionally resembled 
Pinkie Doran in language if not in appearance, and 
indeed the whole Maison Ricard personnel, when 
customers were not there to see and hear, seemed 
not unlike Thomdyke’s. 

As the weeks went by, Tess settled into a com¬ 
fortable routine of pouring tea by day from her 
polished samovar at the edge of the richly-carpeted 
salon, where the mannequins paraded for the en¬ 
lightenment of critical wives of millionaires, and by 
night penetrating even more deeply into the butter¬ 
fly-life that flourished after the artificial heaven of 
electricity was lighted along the Gay White Way. 
And time had already registered its changes with 
her. Heavy make-up darkening her eyes and scar- 
leting her lips under the fluffy light-purple turban, a 
tight-fitting shimmering gown lending a new dignity 
to her slim body from throat to toes, she was far 
different, as she gracefully proffered a tiny glass of 
exotically Russian design to an obviously thrilled 
banker’s wife, from the Tess who had so gratefully 


216 


MANHANDLED 


welcomed Jim’s protecting arms, on disembarking 
at the Grand Central Station and hearing the first 
roar of the city in her ears. 

Upon her forays into Broadway’s night-life, she 
wore other and more conservative gowns, borrowed 
from Ricard at his request, though retaining much 
of her facial make-up. Indeed Mrs. Binner, more 
nosy than motherly, had looked askance several 
times at the bundles which Tess brought home 
marked with the crest of the fashionable modiste, 
and Walters, meeting the girl in the hallway one 
evening, as, burdened with a new-parceled gown 
and hat, she hurried up the stairway, exchanged 
knowing glances with the landlady. He had never 
quite got over Tess’s innocent dinner-table account 
of the Lou Hertz “Who the hell is Walters?” inci¬ 
dent. 

In the busy whirl that life had become for her, 
Tess was worried at times that the two things which 
she seemed to be most neglecting were the very two 
things, which, her contemplative moments disturb¬ 
ingly assured her, were most worth while—Jim and 
the card-painting work she was doing in Brandt’s 
studio. Ricard’s offers to teach her gown-designing 
had thus far not made themselves evident, and she 
had not pressed him, knowing from her more inti¬ 
mate contact with his high-powered and generously 



A Paramount Picture . Manhandled . 

AS A RUSSIAN COUNTESS, TESS GAVE THE PATRONS A THRILL* 













































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• -. 




* 








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. 




. 




























MANHANDLED 


217 


paid activities that stopping to instruct an amateur in 
his trade would entail a real sacrifice of time, money, 
and tranquillity on his part, if not on hers. 

Brandt had completed his four panels for the Art 
Theater, as far as her posing was concerned. As 
he had predicted, he still found no use for her in 
working out his fourth panel of Tragedy . 

“You’re riding the crest now, Tess,” he told her 
seriously, “and you look anything but the soul of 
tragedy.” 

“But I can imitate tragedy, Bob,” she laughed. 
“Look.” And she distorted her sensitive features 
into a simulation of abject woebegoneness that made 
him smile in spite of himself. In her presence, she 
had noticed to her discomfiture, Brandt seemed al¬ 
ways to be holding himself under leash. She secret¬ 
ly objected to this, and to its implications. On the 
few occasions lately when she had let herself into his 
studio to do her own neglected work, it seemed to 
her he had made a distinct point each time to be en¬ 
tirely absent or to find some excuse for leaving im¬ 
mediately after her arrival. 

“No, Tess,” he finally said, “in this series I must 
have sincerity or nothing. I couldn’t even use you 
for Comedy now.” 

“Why not?” 

“Well, I caught the first fresh, innocent unspoiled- 


2 l8 


MANHANDLED 


ness of you when you posed for that. And it isn’t 
there any more.” He checked himself abruptly, 
wondering if he had said too much. 

“Do you think Fve gone backward?” she asked, 
disturbed that the artistic Brandt and the mechanical 
Jim should have said almost the same thing about 
her. 

“Backward? No. You’ve got city common 
sense and the protective hardness that I dare say is 
necessary for a girl in this town.” 

He was standing very close to her, and she was 
struck by the narrowed and hungry look in his eyes 
as they swept her. “Necessary everywhere you go 
among men—even here,” he added, and, with a 
short unintelligible exclamation of scorn at his own 
weakness, snatched up his hat and fairly hurled 
himself out of the door. 

Jim Hogan was working very hard that fall and 
winter—too hard, Tess kept assuring him, with an 
anxious look at his darkly circled eyes and the 
obvious shrinkage of flesh from his still broad 
shoulders and chest. 

“Why do you go back to the garage at night after 
you’ve put in your full time during the day?” she 
asked him on one of her few free evenings in early 
December as they sat down together in Mrs. Bin- 
ner’s former parlor after dinner. 


MANHANDLED 


219 


“I work for myself nights. For instance, I’m 
packing up my carburetor to-night. The Detroit 
people wrote me saying they’d take a look at it, and 
I’m sending it to them,” he moodily explained. And 
then, never able to get it out of his mind how she 
was drifting away from him, he added, “But what 
about yourself? You work hard all day at that 
crazy job of yours, and then go out all night. You 
don’t look so healthy yourself.” 

She flushed and then laughed. “Oh, I feel all 
right. Besides, my parties aren’t work. They’re 
recreation. Carl and Chip and Bob and the rest are 
stimulating.” 

“And I’m not.” 

“You’re different, Jim,” she said with a wistful 
tenderness that he stubbornly tried not to see. 
“You’re my good old balance-wheel. If it weren’t 
for you, I’d probably have long since gone flying off 
into space and smashed.” 

“Well, suppose some day the old balance-wheel 
gets tired and just naturally lies down on the job? 
What then?” 

She fidgeted nervously. She had never known 
she possessed nerves until lately. She grasped his 
coat and laughed. “Why doesn’t the old balance- 
wheel get some new life into him then by taking me 
out to the movies or somewhere, right now? We 


220 


MANHANDLED 


haven’t been anywhere together in an awful while, 
Jim.” 

‘That hasn’t been my fault, entirely,” he was 
justified in replying. “You’re never home, and I’m 
working nights, and I can’t afford to take you where 
you want to go.” 

“To-night I want to go to the movies, and I’ll 
blow, if you like.” 

“No, thanks. I’m packing up my carburetor to¬ 
night.” 

“I’ll come down to the garage with you then and 
keep you company. Maybe I can help,” she offered, 
determined to placate him. 

His face brightened. 

“All right,” he cried. “Maybe you can chase the 
jinx away from the darned thing and bring me some 
good luck for a change.” She wished, then, that 
she had kept better posted about this invention of 
his. Somehow it had seemed such a futile thing 
for Jim, her good old hard-working Jim, to be put¬ 
ting so much terribly hard labor and time into that 
cold and aggravating little piece of machinery, as it 
seemed to her when he had showed it to her two 
months ago, and expecting it to make his fortune— 
and hers. She felt a vague resentment toward it, 
not only because it had caused her to spend two very 
boring nights with him at the New York Automobile 


MANHANDLED 


221 


Show, where he had stood for hours gazing wraptly 
into the interiors of immodestly undraped cars and 
she had tried desperately to register an interest she 
didn’t feel in the least, but because it was taking 
him away from her, rasping his formerly placid 
temperament into nervous tenter-hooks and possibly 
undermining his health. Once the carburetor was 
off his mind, she had frequently told herself, he 
would be able to give her the attention she craved, 
be his old dear self and make a place for himself in 
her life. If she was selfish in her outlook, she was 
not for the present willing to see it that way. 

As she hurried up-stairs for her hat and cloak to 
go out with him, she felt very virtuous in the 
thought that she was about to sacrifice a whole even¬ 
ing for Jim. Especially when she heard him 
whistling cheerfully as he climbed the additional- 
flight of stairs to his own room to prepare for the 
wintry air outside. 

But before she had taken her second-best coat 
from its hook, the telephone shrilled down in the hall 
below, and the voice of Walters sounded loudly up 
to her. 

"Call for you, Miss McGuire.’* 

She dropped her coat and hurried down. It was 
Chip Thorndyke, and he wanted her to try out his 
new car with him. 


222 


MANHANDLED 


“We’ll run over to Westbury, get something Hot 
to eat and dash right back,” he promised. 

“I can’t to-night, Chip. I have a date.” 

Jim was half-way down to her, and she did not 
see him in time to check the regretful ring in her 
voice. She clapped her hand over the transmitter 
and explained to Jim who it was. She couldn’t 
help it; the prospect of a brisk ride on that moonlit 
night in the kind of car Chip drove and the way he 
drove it was not without its appeal. 

“Oh, don’t mind me. Go ahead/' Jim said, none 
too convincingly. Then, with the stubbornness of 
a martyr: “You can’t help me any. You’d only 
be in the way.” 

“You’re sure you won’t mind?” she appealed, 
half-hoping he would seize the phone, snap the re¬ 
ceiver up and force her to go along with him. He 
nodded in the negative, and, without a look back at 
her, opened the street-door and disappeared. 

Tess returned to the telephone and Chip. 

“Maybe I can make it at that,” she said defiantly. 
“But I’ve told you I wouldn’t ride alone with you 
any more. You’ll have to get somebody else to go 
along with us.” 

“Afraid of me ?” came his mocking voice over the 
wire to her. 

“No. But I prefer men who can read a no-tres- 


MANHANDLED 


223 


passing sign. Forgetting sometimes spoils the fun.” 

“All right, iceberg, you win. I’ll have a chaperon 
with me. Ten minutes from now?” 

“O. K.!” she said with her habitual little cry 
of approval. 

And she sped up-stairs and changed her clothes. 

When Chip arrived in a low, tightly-curtained 
runabout and an enormous fur coat, she saw that the 
essential third person had taken the form of a tired- 
looking music-critic named Gilliard, who smoked 
incensive Turkish cigarettes and exhaled an odor of 
gin. She felt that Thorndyke had met her terms in 
a somewhat qualified manner. But she enjoyed the 
ride out into the country and she enjoyed the color 
and movement of the unexpectedly pretentious inn, 
where she found a table reserved for them. She 
declined to participate in the synthetized cocktails 
which Gilliard poured from a voluminous silver 
pocket-flask and danced with him once and once 
only, when he held her unnecessarily close to his 
attenuated body and breathed alcoholic endearments 
into her ear. 

She was relieved, in fact, when he withdrew from 
the scene. She found something reassuring in Chip 
Thorndyke’s unnaturally thoughtful sobriety, in the 
ease and discretion with which he danced, in the 
courtly if slightly mocking respect with which he 


224 


MANHANDLED 


treated her. He was equally quiet and self-absorbed 
when he suggested, after she had complained that 
the music was beginning to make her head ache, that 
they run on to Spring Harbor for supper. 

He did not argue with her, when she objected 
that it was too late for that, but climbed into the 
seat beside her and tucked her up in a motor-rug. 
A vague sense of escape took possession of her as 
they sped cityward through the starlit night, thread¬ 
ing their way through light-spangled towns and 
stretches of snow-white open country given over 
to shadows and silence. It was not until he stopped 
in, a gusty side-road and turned off both his engine 
and his lights that she realized the flimsy foundation 
on which her feeling of security had rested. 

“Can’t you be kind to me, dearest ?” he said with 
a deeper note of feeling in his voice. 

“I don’t quite understand what I’m to be kind 
about,” she retorted in a singularly quiet voice, curi¬ 
ous in spite of herself. 

“You know it’s you I want—all of you,” he pro¬ 
tested, with his arm tightening about her. 

“But what are you offering me ?” she demanded, 
with the point of her elbow, like a spear-head, hold¬ 
ing him off. 

“Everything,” he cried* “everything to make life 
happier and lovelier for you. You’re not made for 


MANHANDLED 225 

sordid things and I want to protect you from them.” 

“Does that mean you’re asking to marry me?” 

“I’m not free to do that,” he said, after a moment 
of silence. 

“Then when you speak of protecting me you 
really mean keeping me?” she rather wearily in¬ 
quired. “It must be that, remembering you’re al¬ 
ready a married man.” 

“But I want you more than anything else in this 
world,” he persisted, his arms still clasped about her. 
The barricading elbow, however, still stood between 
them. 

“What would you do with me?” she asked in a 
flatted voice that took the final tension out of his 
arms. 

“I’d see that you had everything a woman could 
want.” 

She shook her head from side to side, “But the 
one thing a woman wants wouldn’t be there.” 

“I could be very good to you,” he said, with un¬ 
looked for humility. 

“But your being good to me, as you express it, 
implies an ugly situation. And I hate ugliness.’ 
She writhed away from him and sat stiff in the 
leather-padded seat. “Let’s be going.” 

“I don’t intend to give you up,” he said with a 
quiet moroseness as they swung back into the main- 


226 


MANHANDLED 


traveled road. And she wondered why she had not 
the heart to be angrier with him. 

“I don’t want you to,” she agreed as they headed 
homeward. “I’d like to feel that we could be 
friends, that we could ride this way together under 
the stars without being afraid of each other.” 

“Men aren’t made that way,” he gloomily pro¬ 
claimed. “And when I see that rose-bud pout of 
your lips, I want to kiss them.” 

“Why?” she asked. 

“Because they’re so provocative.” 

“But there can’t be much kick in it, if they don’t 
kiss back,” she protested, unwilling to see him re¬ 
cede too hopelessly into the background. 

“I intend to make them, before I get through 
with you,” was his genially ominous threat. 


CHAPTER XVI 


I T was one day during the week following that 
Tess, hurrying to a belated lunch in the doubtful 
sunshine of a Fifth Avenue winter afternoon, 
plunged almost headlong into a large man in a heavy 
ulster, who had suddenly popped out of the mauso¬ 
leum-like bank-building she was passing. She met 
and caromed off his shoulder as he went with head 
down against the wind, making for his automobile 
at the curb. 

Tess looked up quickly and found herself gazing 
into the face of Todd Harlan—Todd with an unac¬ 
customed mustache and slightly mottled complexion 
and scandalously heavy lines about the jowls and 
waist. But unmistakably it was Todd. 

“Skipper!” he almost shouted. “That’s certainly 
twisting the long arm of coincidence out of her 
socket I heard you were in town when my uncle 
was in New York Thanksgiving time. I’d have 
looked you up if I’d known where to look.” 

“And I you,” she found the courage to protest. 
“You could get me in the phone book,” he chided. 
“But that’s neither here nor there. And we can’t 
stand jabbering or we’ll both freeze to death. How 
227 


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about giving me an hour, if you’ve nothing better? 
Had your lunch ?” 

She hadn’t, she admitted. 

“Well, lunch first. Then we’ll go to a matinee 
and have tea and dance at the Plaza later, and you 
can tell me the story of your young life.” 

“I can’t, Todd. I’m a working girl. I have to 
be back on the job in an hour.” 

“That so ? At least you can have lunch with me?” 

When he had tucked her into the seat beside him 
and was swinging around the corner toward the 
Biltmore, he shot another appraising glance at her 
and remarked admiringly, “You’re certainly looking 
like a million dollars. [This job of yours must be a 
hummer.” 

She told him just enough about it to pique his 
curiosity. 

“My wife buys her duds at Ricard’s,” he com¬ 
mented. “Boy, they know how to soak you, too.” 
She wondered if she were mistaken in thinking his 
forehead furrowed a bit as he spoke of his wife. 
He made her uneasy, somehow. It was like going 
to lunch with Samson after his locks had been 
sheared or a Napoleon escaped from Elbe. Why 
couldn’t a handsome stalwart fellow like Todd take 
care of himself after entering the business-world? 
She had met so many of them—baggy-eyed. 


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229 


paunchy, middle-aged men who were introduced to 
her as former college crew heroes and football 
giants, men who contented themselves with fiddling 
at golf over the spring and summer week-ends and 
otherwise allowed their neglected abused bodies to 
slide upon the shoot that leads eventually to apo¬ 
plexy or ataxia. It was a shame. It was, some¬ 
how, an offense against God. 

“Family ?” he laughed, a little bitterly, she 
thought, while they were waiting for luncheon. “I 
haven’t any. My wife’s in France—been there since 
October.” He seemed anxious to change the sub¬ 
ject. “But say, you look different than you used 
to. Skipper. More class, prettier than ever. You’re 
citified, too. I tell you, it gets us all, doesn’t it? 
You look just like the girls my wife bats around 
with. You’re younger, of course, but you’re getting 
there.” 

She asked him, not without coquetry, if he did not 
fancy her as she was now. 

“Oh, sure,” he hastened to flatter her. “I’ve al¬ 
ways liked you. Skipper, ever since you were a kid. 
Remember the old diving-board? In those days I 
was going to be a professional swimmer and travel 
around the world like Duke Kahanomoku or some 
chap like that. And you and I were going into 
vaudeville together, weren’t we? I dare say every- 


230 


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body gets nut ideas like that. And here I am junior 
partner in a brokerage house and director of a 
dozen or so companies that I don’t know a damned 
thing about, and care less.” He did not say it 
boastingly. He said it as if it didn’t make him par¬ 
ticularly happy. “I was just coming out of a 
directors’ meeting when I bumped into you. So 
that was one meeting I’ll never regret attending.” 

“Are you trying to flirt with me, Todd?” she 
asked, with raised eyebrows. 

“Everybody does, don’t they?” he smiled and, 
dipping his fingers into the lukewarm finger-bowl, 
dried them and lighted a very black cigar. “New 
York’s a tough town on a pretty girl.” 

“Why do you say that?” she came back com¬ 
batively. “New York’s what you make out of it. 
I don’t understand you gloomy men knocking it all 
the time. This town has been very good to me.” 

“It’s treacherous though, Skipper. It’ll turn on 
you some day. The thing to do is to take your pile 
and beat it a second before that happens. That’s 
what my Uncle John did. He was only forty-five, 
right in the prime of his business life, when he re¬ 
tired and bought that place in Marysville. Wall 
Street thought he was crazy—and still does. We 
were talking seriously about that very thing when he 
and Aunt Constance were in on Thanksgiving. He 


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231 


told me then how at forty-five he was right up to 
his neck in New York, hitting a terrific nervous 
pace in Wall Street all day and burning up more 
energy running a big town-house and dashing 
around to parties practically every night during the 
season. Aunt Constance and he had hardly a minute 
to themselves or to each other from October to May. 
Pretty soon he wasn’t feeling right and his doctor 
was shaking his head over him—high blood pressure 
and all that.” 

Tess tried to be interested, but it seemed a re- 
countal of far-off history. 

“Well, Uncle John has always had astounding 
sense. ‘Here’s where we quit, then,’ he said to Aunt 
Constance. And, miracle of miracles, she agreed. 
He withdrew from practically all his companies, 
handed over his share of his brokerage business, ex¬ 
cept for a small interest, to his partners, and then 
and there rusticated. It’s funny, but he hasn’t 
rusted out, as some of these wise ones claim a tre¬ 
mendously active man does if he gives up business. 
He simply substituted healthy interests for un¬ 
healthy ones. He yachts, fishes, golfs, raises fruits 
and vegetables and chickens, and has a whale of a 
time.” Todd reached over and reclaimed some of 
the change from the waiter’s silently proffered little 
silver platter, leaned back and sighed. “Well, that’s 


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232 

the dope, Skipper, get out one jump ahead of the 
earthquake.” 

“Having listened to your sermon, Todd,” she 
laughed, ‘Til now have to burn up a thousand or 
so foot-pounds of extra energy tearing back to 
work, so I won’t be fired.” 

“I’ll drop you wherever you say,” he offered, ris¬ 
ing and beating the waiter to helping her with her 
cloak. 

“This sort of thing ought to happen often, now 
that we’ve rediscovered each other,” he urged as he 
assisted her to alight in front of the Maison Ricard. 
“How about a show to-morrow night ?” 

“I’m booked,” she said. But she agreed to dinner 
and the theater for a night, one week away. 

To that meeting, however, she looked forward 
with doubtful pleasure. Todd depressed her. She 
sensed underneath his attempted cheerful matter- 
of-factness and genuine pleasure in seeing her again 
a vague unhappiness. New York, despite the fact 
that it had evidently made him rich, had not made 
him contented. Tess wondered what Mrs. Todd 
could be like, this indifferent lady who had been 
yachting when Todd arrived that time at New Lon¬ 
don for the week-end and who had now deserted 
him to journey abroad. 

But thoughts of Todd were banished temporarily 


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233 


from her head when, on the following evening, 
while Mrs. Binner’s household were clattering and 
chattering at dinner, the slovenly maid leaned over 
Tess and whispered stridently, “There’s a party out 
in the parlor askin’ for you, Miss McGuire.” Tess 
abandoned her unappetizing wedge of mince pie to 
ascertain the cause of the message and from the 
parlor-doorway saw a young man and woman sitting 
on Mrs. Binner’s overworked divan. She did not 
at first recognize them. But when she came closer, 
Tess uttered a joyous little exclamation, followed 
by, “Why, Claire!” and an exuberant kiss of wel¬ 
come. 

Then she held her former roommate and plied 
her with eager questions without giving the equally 
excited Claire a chance to answer them until the 
latter had fairly to turn her bodily around to face 
the grinning third person in the room, whom Tess 
had been inhospitably neglecting. 

“You know Fred, don’t you, Tess?” Claire asked, 
a little catch of pride in her voice. 

Tess faced Claire’s husband and shook hands with 
him. Even in the midst of her enthusiasm at see¬ 
ing their familiar faces, Tess realized that both 
Claire and Fred had changed, and the change was 
for the better. They were well-dressed, healthy- 
looking and with a certain contented poise about 


234 


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them that she felt at once. Fred had lost his sullen, 
hang-dog expression, was bigger and evidently very 
much a man. 

“Fred’s folks are in Florida for the winter, and 
we’re making a flying trip to join them for a few 
weeks,” Claire explained. “We’ve been working 
pretty hard running the farm, and they thought the 
change would do us good. We’re taking the boat 
to-morrow. When I found we were going to be in 
New York over-night, I wrote to your aunt and got 
your address. I thought we would surprise you.” 

“You succeeded,” Tess admitted. 

Jim had entered the room in the vanguard of the 
other boarders, and Tess introduced him to her 
friends. Fred and he were soon smoking and deep 
in conversation, leaving the girls to continue their 
animated chat. 

Finally, the two tete-a-tetes lulling somewhat, 
Tess suggested, “Let’s all four celebrate by going 
to a show.” 

Fred and Jim seemed to be hitting it off very well, 
she noticed, and she was relieved to see the tired 
harassed look had already begun to disappear from 
Jim’s face. 

.They roared down to the Grand Central Station 
in a subway express, alighting to walk up Forty- 
second Street, the men ahead and the girls arm-in- 


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235 


arm behind them, through the flood of Fifth Avenue 
motors dammed temporarily by the traffic police¬ 
man’s sturdy arm, and on into the seething mael¬ 
strom of Broadway’s evening pleasure-seekers. 

“You can get good theater-seats this time of year 
in Grey’s,” Tess said confidentially to Jim, mention¬ 
ing the name of New York’s chief cut-rate ticket- 
office, and thinking to ease some of the strain on his 
pocketbook. 

Jim seemed to be enjoying this impromptu adven¬ 
ture. He was vastly pleased, if a little surprised at 
Tess’s unaffected pleasure in the company of this 
plain, wholesome young country couple. It seemed 
to prove as nothing else could have, that she was 
after all still unaffected and sound at heart. So, 
waving her economical suggestion aside, he plunged 
into Tyson’s and returned with four tickets for the 
Follies orchestra. 

Suddenly, as they crossed Broadway, Tess gasped 
and said, ‘Tm frightfully stupid, Claire. I never 
asked you and Fred if you had had your dinners.” 

“Yes. We’re stopping at the Commodore and 
ate before we looked you up,” Fred answered, 
simply enough. And Jim was very glad that he had 
not bought tickets in Grey’s. 

Dale James and Ann Patterson closed the first 
part of the show with their dancing-act, and Tess 


MANHANDLED 


236 

whispered to Claire that she knew them. During 
the intermission, while the boys adjourned for a 
smoke, Tess described, under Claire’s prompting, 
more about the party at Brandt’s studio where she 
had met the Follies favorites. 

“You must be having a wonderful time here, 
Tess,” Claire commented. 

And thus encouraged, Tess related more about her 
adventures among the white lights, though somehow 
they did not gain the response from Claire that Tess 
rather expected they would. 

“It must be lots of fun,” declared Claire, “but I 
don’t think I’d be crazy about living here.” This 
from the romantic, scatter-brained Claire! 

“But don’t you find it awfully dull on a fruit- 
farm?” asked Tess, rather set down. “I should 
die.” 

“I love it,” Claire countered stoutly. “Of course 
everybody admits there’s no place like the country 
eight months of the year, and the other four aren’t 
bad. We run into town for the movies or to New 
London if we want to see a real show. A number 
of them open there, you know. And we have a 
wonderful radio set. We’ve had San Francisco 
and Atlanta and everything in between. We may 
be rubes, Tess, but we hear the same orchestras 
you’re probably dancing to, night after night.” 


MANHANDLED 


237 


“But isn’t the work fearfully hard ?” 

“Yes, we work. Fred is running the farm almost 
altogether now. His father has practically retired, 
and in a year or two the place will be entirely ours. 
We’ve had a wonderful year. Father Blake has 
promised that if we do as well next year, we can go 
to Florida next winter and he’ll stay up and look 
after things. You should see my house, Tess. I’ve 
every improvement you’d find in any city home— 
hot-water, heat, electric-lights, iron-and-washing- 
machine, vacuum-cleaner and everything. I belong 
to two clubs in the village, and we have bridge, mah 
jongg and dancing-parties regularly. I don’t think 
the country is so bad.” 

“It doesn’t sound so,” Tess agreed. She was 
getting a new light upon the rural life she had so 
thoroughly scorned. Certainly Fred and Claire 
looked healthy and happy enough. 

“Have you been to Marysville lately?” Claire 
interrupted Tess’s thoughts. “From your aunt’s 
letter I got the idea that she was sort of lonesome. 
She didn’t say so, but I read it between the lines.” 

Tess flushed. There was no reason for the guilty 
pang that shot through her, she argued to herself. 
She had written to Aunt Kit regularly, and the dear 
old soul hadn’t hinted to her of being lonesome. 

“I’m thinking of running up and seeing her over 


238 


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Christmas,” Tess answered. She didn’t tell Claire, 
however, that it was the first time she had definitely 
contemplated such a thing. But now that she had 
committed herself, she on the spur of the moment 
decided that she would visit Marysville at Christ¬ 
mas time, little more than two weeks off. They 
would be tremendously busy at the shop, but Arno 
Ricard had been more than kind to her. She was 
sure she could get an extra day or two off. 

“I told Fred about my carburetor,” Jim said hap¬ 
pily to her when the boys had resumed their seats 
for the second act “He’s all worked up over it!” 

“Yes,” Fred leaned over and added, taking it for 
granted Tess was as deeply interested in the fateful 
piece of machinery as was Jim, “it sounds all right 
to me, and if it’ll do what Jim thinks it will, seems 
as if those Detroit people ought to grab it quick.” 

“Fred knows a lot about automobiles,” Claire as¬ 
sured Jim with pardonable pride. 

“Yes, I know he does,” put in Tess mischievously, 
and looked so knowingly at Fred that, remember¬ 
ing, he blushed a little. And Claire laughed out¬ 
right 

That was the time you told me Fred was a fat¬ 
head,” she brazenly announced; and it was Tess’s 
turn to redden. 

“Well, I’m sure he isn’t a fathead now,” Tess 


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239 


recovered. “I think he’s a very clever man to have 
grabbed you when he could, Claire, and to make the 
success of himself and his farm that you’ve been 
telling me about.” 

Thus she strove to smooth things over before the 
curtain rose and the Follies commenced to dazzle 
them anew. 

When they left the Blakes at the Commodore 
after the show and descended to the Subway, Jim 
turned to Tess and said approvingly, “I like them. 
They’re real. You don’t meet many of that kind in 
this town.” 

Tess wondered if one did. She lay awake, con¬ 
templatively awake, for a long time that night. The 
manner in which Claire had calmly listened to her 
account of her parties and clothes and the celebrities 
she had associated with and then remarked with 
such quiet conviction, “But I don’t think I would be 
crazy to live here,” had made a much deeper im¬ 
pression than Tess would admit. The present Claire 
w r as no fool. And there was about her and Fred, 
as Jim had said, something real and substantial and 
deeply rooted that was not apparent in Chip Thorn- 
dyke or Bob Brandt or Carl Garretson or even in 
Todd Harlan. It was the same quality that existed 
in Jim, that made her feel that if she lost Jim she 
would in some way be hopelessly adrift. 


240 


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The next morning she told Jim that she was going 
to Marysville for Christmas, and invited him to 
come along. 

‘Tm glad you're going, Tess,” was his reply. 
“And I’d certainly go along if I could. But I’m ex¬ 
pecting to hear from Detroit any day now. And if 
their answer is O. K. they’ll probably ask me to 
jump out there right away. They’ll want to hold 
tests and ask questions, and it’s better for me to be 
on the ground. It’s now or never with me, you 
know. If there’s a chance to put this over, I’m 
going to chuck up my job and beat it out there and 
battle for myself. My best plan js to stick here in 
New York until I hear one way or the other.” 

She was forced to agree with him. He saw her 
off at the Grand Central the day before Christmas, 
and six hours later she was greeting Katherine Mc¬ 
Nair up on the wind-swept station platform at 
Marysville. 

Though her aunt was outwardly as unperturbed 
as ever, Tess could tell from the trembling of the 
elderly lady’s fingers as she held the half-frozen 
hands of her niece that her welcome was going to be 
even warmer than she could have hoped for. 

“I’ve been terribly selfish,” declared Tess, after 
she had hugged and kissed her aunt until her young 
body, chilled from her long ride in a dirty car in 


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241 


which the heating system seemed to have broken 
down, was almost warm again. “I should have rim 
up and seen you sooner. But I've been so rushed 
and you said in all your letters that you were getting 
on so well without me.” 

“I’ve missed you,” Miss McNair said, quite 
simply. But her laconic words spoke volumes. 

Main Street was packed hard with ice and snow, 
and the motor bus in which they were riding lurched 
crazily in the one crooked rut that formed the only 
navigable channel. Cold blasts from the sound 
whistled through the barren trees, and the two 
women huddled close to each other and stamped 
their feet. Heavy storm-doors at the entrances to 
all the houses made them look even uglier than ever. 
The few people who were on the streets were muffled 
to the eyes in wool and heavily booted in arctics. 
Tess thought of Claire and wondered grimly if 
young Mrs. Blake was really serious in her prefer¬ 
ence for the country in the winter-time. 

“Tm sorry, Miss McNair, but I’m scairt to push 
on any further. Drifts are too deep,” came the 
hoarse voice of the fur-capped driven 

And Katherine McNair answered, “All right, 
Pete, we’ll get out here.” 

They were at the point where the traveled road 
joined the private lane leading to the McNair and 


MANHANDLED 


242 

Harlan houses, and; Tess and her aunt were forced 
to wallow fifty yards through unpathed heavy snow, 
to the porch of the house. Tess stood an instant 
looking out toward the leaden waters of the sound 
as her aunt fumbled with the door. It was a dreary 
prospect. The gate at the entrance to the Harlan 
grounds was barricaded, and heavy storm-coverings 
guarded the windows. The place was deserted. 
Mr. and Mrs. Harlan were in Florida, Miss Mo- 
Nair later explained, and indeed it seemed from 
the further bits of gossip she retailed that everybody 
in Marysville who could afford it had sought a 
warmer clime. Tess nursed no suspicion that if her 
aunt could have been by some chance repaid the 
money which she had taken from her inheritance 
for her niece’s upbringing, she too would not have 
been spending the winter in this snow-covered wil¬ 
derness. It is the privilege of youth to think little 
of the past. 

Inside the house it was fairly warm and cheer¬ 
ful. But as Sarah, her aunt’s faithful maid, ex¬ 
plained to Tess out in the kitchen the next morning, 
every house should have a man in it in the winter¬ 
time. Lugging heavy buckets of coal around and 
tending a furnace was fatiguing work for two 
women like Miss McNair and Sarah. And neither 
of them was as young as they once were. 


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243 


Sleeping in her familiar old bedroom overlooking 
the sound was a pleasant enough sensation to Tess, 
though she had to get up in the night and augment 
her three blankets with her fur coat, to keep out 
the nipping wind. In the morning she donned a 
pair of arctics which she discovered in the closet 
of her old room and walked down to the village and 
made several calls. This was not an adventure of 
unalloyed joy. People seemed altogether too anx¬ 
ious to know more about her affairs than she cared 
to tell them, and she caught them looking rather 
suspiciously at her Fifth Avenue clothes and her 
long muskrat coat. 

“I understand you see a lot of Todd Harlan/’ 
sharp-faced Miss Treadway, the post-mistress, re¬ 
marked, with a pointed look over her nose-glasses. 
And Tess glanced so quickly and so penetratingly at 
the assiduous spinster that the latter lowered her 
eyes and faded silently behind her barricade of lock- 
boxes. 

Tess returned from the village mysteriously out 
of sorts, and it took her Aunt Kit’s prodigally elab¬ 
orated Christmas dinner to restore the girl to a good 
humor. After dinner she thoroughly enjoyed a 
long talk with her aunt as they sat, shawls over their 
shoulders, rocking in front of the crackling open 
fire, a needed auxiliary to the undersized furnace. 


MANHANDLED 


244 

Tess described, with certain calculated deletions, 
those details of her life in New |York which she 
had not already related through the mail to her 
aunt, with Miss McNair interspersing the mono¬ 
logue with appropriate comments. When she had 
concluded, Tess leaned back, sighed and asked, “Do 
you think I've changed very much, Aunt Kit ?” 

Miss McNair said, frankly enough: “Yes. You 
left me a girl, and you’ve come back a woman.” 

“Are you sorry?” Tess asked tenderly and curi¬ 
ously. 

“Mothers and foster-mothers always are, aren’t 
they? But the thing happens just the same. You’ve 
come through unspoiled and unsoiled, I can be al¬ 
most sure of that. It’s about as I said—you’re ca¬ 
pable of taking care of yourself.” 

When Tess left for New York the next after¬ 
noon, it was not without exacting a promise from 
Katherine McNair that she would follow her within 
a month or so for a visit. 


CHAPTER XVII 


B Y the end of January it was clear to Tess that 
something would have to be done quickly 
about Todd Harlan. Thus far she had been humor¬ 
ing him, but it couldn’t go on. She had lunched 
with him several times, had devoted at least ten 
evenings to dinner, to supper and midnight-to-morn- 
ing hootch-and-dance clubs with him. And on each 
occasion he had betrayed more and more the de¬ 
sire to pilot her into a secluded comer and make 
love to her. She had curtailed her engagements 
with Chip Thomdyke and surrounded her meetings 
with that young department-store magnate with 
safeguarding restrictions, because of the qualifying 
fact that he was already a married man. Yet she 
did not see why she should be according Todd 
special privileges on the ground of their old friend¬ 
ship. Chip was at least a lively, humorous and 
attractive companion. Todd was emphatically not. 
He was too restless and unhappy. 

When he called her up, therefore, at the Maison 
Ricard late on a January afternoon and declared 
that he must see her that evening, she was uncertain 
at first what to do. Finally she decided that she 
245 


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246 

would see him in order to tell him flatly and finally 
that, unless he altered his behavior toward her, she 
could no longer go out with him. 

Yet she looked neither triumphant nor self-con¬ 
fident as she met him in the lobby of the Bel fridge, 
where he awaited her, oddly impatient and obviously 
ill-at-ease. She refused his suggestion, however, 
that they dine in a private room, and he was forced 
to be content with a secluded table in the alcove 
of the main dining-room. Moreover, she insisted 
on dancing every time the orchestra played, which 
did not help him in the important task he had set 
for himself. 

Finally, after perceiving that finalities could no 
longer be evaded, she turned to him with studious 
and solemn eyes. Then she quietly inquired, over 
her demi-tasse, “Well, Todd, old boy, what’s 
worrying you?” 

“I don’t like to talk about it here, Tess.” 

“It will have to be here or nowhere, I’m afraid.” 
And he knew, by her face, that there was a will 
of iron beneath the voice of velvet. 

“All right then,” he agreed, and lowered his own 
voice. “Tess, I’m sailing for France to-morrow. 
I’m going to Paris to get a divorce from my wife.” 

Tess sat back, startled. 


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247 


“I didn’t tell you the whole truth that first time 
I had lunch with you when I said she’d gone to 
France. She ran away from me with another man. 
Draper Brenon. You may not know it, but he’s 
a pretty bad lot Been mixed up as co-respondent 
in several divorce-suits, and I should have known 
better than to pal around with him. But I suppose 
it’s just as well. If it hadn’t been Brenon it would 
have been some other chap like him. Sally simply 
isn’t a one-man woman. I’m fearfully busy, you 
know, and she’s had nothing to do but play around. 
Neither had Brenon. They drifted together. Part¬ 
ly my fault, I suppose. He has no money, and I 
fancy he ran away with her on the chance I’d buy 
him off and hush the matter up.” 

“Oh, Todd, it can’t be that bad!” gasped Tess, 
with a small movement of mingled horror and in¬ 
credulity. 

But the gray-faced man went on with his story. 

“Two months ago I’d probably have been sap 
enough to buy the beggar off. I loved Sally then, 
even in the face of what she’d done. But I don’t 
now. It’s over. I’m going to divorce her, in 
France, where it’s easy. I’ve got a good reason for 
doing it.” He paused and looked at Tess, hungrily. 
It was the same look of hunger that she had seen 


248 MANHANDLED 

in the face of Bob Brandt. Then Todd added, 
“You’re the reason, Tess.” 

“I?” she asked blankly, and something heavy 
closed her heart. 

“You know I love you,Tess,” he urged, leaning 
over so far toward her that she drew away and 
looked anxiously around. “I guess I’ve always 
loved you since you were a kid. I’ve been un¬ 
happy since the day I married Sally. She’s a 
spoiled and selfish child—but there, I’m not going 
to knock her. She’s hit me hard—but as I said 
before, that’s over. With you I know it would be 
different. I could be happy again, and I know I 
could make you happy. I’ve got enough in my own 
name now to chuck business forever. We could 
travel, go abroad, do about anything you say. 
You’d never have to lift your hand to do another 
stroke the rest of your life. What do you say, 
Tess? Do you, could you, love me?” 

At that moment she was glad, for her own sake, 
that he w r as not the lean-faced, clean-limbed hero 
Todd Harlan of old. For then perhaps he could 
have swept her off her feet with his ardent love- 
making and his promises of riches and ease. He 
might have made her forget Jim Hogan. He might 
have persuaded her that she loved him in spite of 
herself. And it would have been just as big a mis- 


MANHANDLED 


249 


take then, she felt, as it would be now for her to 
yield to him. She did not love him. The fact that 
this was a self-indulged, beaten-by-life Todd Harlan 
sitting opposite her arguing so desperately his hope¬ 
less cause made her feel sorry for him, but it magni¬ 
fied in her heart the conviction that she didn’t love 
him, that she never had, that she never could love 
him. And girls had to think more than men imagine 
about this problem of marriage. 

“I don’t love you, Todd,” Tess told him, kindly 
enough. “If you’re getting your divorce just on the 
chance of marrying me, don’t do it. I like you, and 
I’m sorry. But that’s all.” 

He slumped back into his chair and stared morose¬ 
ly at the cigarette he was nervously pinching out 
against the ash-receiver. The sight of him huddled 
there, broken and discouraged, touched her. But 
then, she thought, he was not yet thirty, with most 
of life ahead of him. Men aren’t wounded perma¬ 
nently before thirty by love. 

Her lips twitched and crinkled into a smile. She 
nursed the impression as she sat studying his face, 
that she had learned a great deal about life since 
she had come to the city. 

“Buck up, old boy,” she was finally able to urge, 
with compassionable quietness, “buck up! You’re 
not hit so hard as all that. Your- wife’s simply dam- 


250 


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aged your pride by preferring another man to you. 
If you don’t want her back badly enough to forgive 
her, get your divorce and start over again. There 
are still plenty of nice girls for a chap like you, 
Todd. And you’re wrong about me. I’m merely 
the lamp-post you leaned against when you got hit. 
You got along very nicely without me until you 
happened to run into me. And you’ll get along 
just as well when you move on again.” 

“I’ve only started to live,” he contended, “since 
I met you on Fifth Avenue that day.” 

It seemed strange that she should be able to 
talk about love and marriage and destiny in this 
casual way. A year ago in Marysville and it would 
have been out of the question. 

“Oh, you were very much alive before that,” she 
reminded him, with a barricading effort at laughter. 
“So, please, Todd, don’t fool yourself—or me. 
And now they’re playing After the Storm , our 
favorite fox-trot, and you’ve simply got to snap 
out of it and dance with me.” 

Though he protested, he yielded and arose at 
the first encore, and when they resumed their chairs 
again she had the qualified satisfaction of noting 
that his pathetic face was clearing a little. 

“Let’s move on to a show and some quiet place 
for a drink and a dance afterward,” he found the 


MANHANDLED 251 

courage to suggest out of that newly achieved forti¬ 
tude. 

‘Til go to the theater with you, Todd, if you’ll 
make it something lively,” she agreed. “But I 
can’t dance any more to-night. I want to go home 
and think about things.” 

She was both sorry for Todd and impatient with 
him. He had had everything showered upon him, 
yet he had made rather a sorry mess of it all. Like 
most girls with their eyes fixed on the future, she 
was phantasmally intolerant of failure. 

Just outside the door of the dining-room, she 
stood meditatively by while Todd reclaimed his hat 
and stick and coat in exchange for the customary 
bribe. She was in no mood to fence amusedly with 
the admiring glances of the entering male diners. 
She had permitted her contemptuously appraising 
eye to rest for a second upon the vapidly pretty face 
and the handsome ermine cloak of a typical little 
blonde gold-digger standing near, when she became 
aware of something familiar about the generous 
contours of the girl’s escort, who had stopped almost 
at Tess’s elbow to shed his wraps. In almost the 
same instant he saw her. It was Luther Swett 

His chubby face broke into a benevolent smile 
as he greeted her. 

“This is an unexpected pleasure,” he exuded. “I 


252 


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haven’t seen you in a long time. Sorry I can’t stop 
and chat. My—er—niece is waiting.” She saw 
indeed that the baby-faced blonde was tapping her 
silver slipper upon the carpet and regarding Tess 
with a keen look that did not exactly match her 
ingenue make-up. Evidently she beheld in Tess a 
possible rival. “When may I see you again?” 
Swett lingered and cajoled. 

“I’m really rather busy,” Tess parried. 

“I’m giving a little wedding-party at Pickwick 
Arms, in Greenwich, for a stage friend of Verlyna’s 
a week from Sunday,” he urged. “I’d be mighty 
glad to have you join us. We’re going up and back 
in my car. Couldn’t you come along?” 

Tess hesitated. 

“We need a touch of youth and beauty to brighten 
us up,” persisted the man at her side. And Tess 
smiled her gratitude and finally accepted. She was 
still smiling as Todd, gloved and coated for the cold 
outdoors, appeared at her side. 

“Hello, Swett!” He saluted the financier indif¬ 
ferently, and the two men shook hands, apparently 
none too pleased to see each other. 

“I didn’t know you two were acquainted,” said 
Tess. 

“Oh, yes, Harlan and I have done business to¬ 
gether in the Street,” wheezed Luther Swett, and 


MANHANDLED 


253 


then, with an anxious glance toward his now glower¬ 
ing companion, he explained, “I must be going, 
though. Don’t forget, Miss McGuire, a week from 
Sunday. I’ll call for you about three.” 

“You turn me down, and yet you team up with 
that old pirate,” Todd growled as they hurried 
through the foyer toward the main entrance of the 
hotel. 

“There’s no harm in accepting an invitation to 
ride in his car, is there?” she demanded. 

“Swett’s automobile-rides frequently lead to com¬ 
plications,” he warned. 

“This one won’t.” 

She hadn’t the heart to tell Todd that she had 
seen the show before when he revealed to her that 
it was the Follies they were visiting. Mr. Ziegfeld’s 
exhibit, she decided, had been more fun when she 
witnessed it in company with Jim and the Blakes 
than it was with this silent and disappointed married 
lover as her seatmate. 

After the show he again urged her to prolong the 
evening with him, but she firmly declined. So he 
glumly piled her into his sedan and failed to urge 
her to snuggle over to him for warmth, as he had 
boyishly done on other occasions. He was silent 
during the ride through the snow-piled streets to 
her boarding-house and seemed so broken and safe 


254 


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that she did not protest when he followed her out 
of the car up to her door and waited while she 
turned the key in the lock. Then suddenly, with 
the door half open, he seized her convulsively in 
his arms and kissed her. He kissed her violently 
on the lips before she realized her danger. The 
blood flared into her face and she plunged her fists 
into his broad chest and pushed him back, standing 
a few feet away and panting angrily. 

Recovering herself, she asked, “Why did you have 
to do that, Todd?” 

“I love you,” he answered unsteadily, plainly not 
yet himself. 

"It's a funny way of showing it,” she retorted. 
“Do I seem like the sort of a girl who likes to be 
mauled that way?” 

“I don’t know whether you like it,” and his voice 
had turned a little bitter, “but you invite it.” 

She bristled. “I beg your pardon.” 

He made a half-puzzled and a half-hopeless ges¬ 
ture with both of his great palms. 

“Maybe not. I don’t know. All I know is that 
all the time I’ve been with you I’ve wanted to do 
just that—take hold of you and kiss you till it 
hurt.” 

“I don’t understand that kind of love,” she re¬ 
plied, though it came to her as a bit of a shock, his 


MANHANDLED 


255 


echoing so nearly what other men had told her. “I 
don’t think it’s love at all. It’s something uglier. 
And now I think you’d better go.” 

“Won’t you even come down to the dock to¬ 
morrow and say good-by to me?” he pleaded. 
“Won’t you give me something to hope for?” 

“I can’t get away. And I don’t think I would if 
I could.” 

Frankness, after all, was the best medicine for 
men who so easily forgot themselves. 

He sighed. “Good-by then,” he said and held 
out his hand. 

She took it, troubled by her own tangle of emo¬ 
tions. He looked so utterly abject that she had 
an impulse, out of pure charity, to kiss him briefly 
and flee. But she knew he would misunderstand. 
So she contented herself with a friendly hand on 
his shoulder. She let it rest there for one prolonged 
moment. Then she turned and left him. 

As she turned, after closing the door, to go up 
the half-dark stairway to her room, she was aware 
of a shadowy and bulky presence just inside the 
darkened parlor. 

Tess hesitated, one foot on the first step, and said 
with emphasized clearness, “Good evening, Mrs. 
Binner.” Her landlady was given to night-prowl¬ 
ing and a gnawing curiosity about her boarders’ 


MANHANDLED 


256 

affairs, Tess knew; and this was not the first time 
Tess had resented it to the elderly woman’s face. 

Realizing she had been discovered, the kimono- 
clad widow stepped defiantly forth. She did not 
like Tess. She regarded with suspicion the fine 
clothes this high-spirited girl with her fine manners 
and sharp tongue wore, her dapper young men of 
another class who were obviously so out of place in 
the Binner parlor when they sat waiting for her, 
and the over-luxurious cars they arrived and de¬ 
parted in. There was something fishy about it to 
Mrs. Binner, there was! She had always kept a 
respectable house, she had! And that young Mr. 
Hogan must be blind! 

“I just waited up to remind you, Miss McGuire/’ 
said the landlady, both her chins thrust forward, 
“that you’re owing me two weeks’ board and—” 

“I’ll pay you here and now,” announced Tess, 
stepping out under the dim light. She opened her 
pocketbook and fished for the necessary amount. 
The very amplitude of the disinterred roll of bills 
brought a disdainful sniff from Mrs. Binner’s nos¬ 
trils. 

Conscious of that half-sneering calm, Tess was 
uneasily wondering how much Mrs. Binner had seen 
of Todd’s sudden embrace. She found out im¬ 
mediately. 


MANHANDLED 


257 


“I want to say too,” Mrs. Binner rumbled on, 
counting the money, “that I don’t like goings-on on 
my premises such as I happened to see just before 
you came in. I ain’t used to having girls like 
you—” 

“‘Just happened to’—that’s funny,” Tess 
laughed mirthlessly. She took a step toward the 
fuming landlady, the McGuire danger-signal flashing 
into her eyes. “You mind your own business as 
far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Binner, and I’ll take 
care of mine. I pay my board. That’s all you 
want of me, and that’s more than a lot of these 
scandal-hounds around here do. You’re not my 
guardian; you’re my landlady only. And the next 
time I catch you spying on me, I’ll move.” 

Mrs. Binner contented herself with unintelligible 
mutters as Tess mounted the stairs. The rooming 
business was bad enough at present, and, as Tess 
said, “that fast McGuire girl,” had at least the one 
virtue of paying her way. She was of the kind 
who could afford to. Yet Tess would never have 
allowed her bill to run on two weeks had she been 
less occupied with other things. You must pay as 
you go—that was one of the lessons the city had 
already taught her. And she assured herself, be¬ 
fore she fell asleep that night, that she was willing 
to pay. 


MANHANDLED 


258 

Tess’s alarm clock had sounded, the next morn¬ 
ing, and she was lying, one eye on the too-swift 
moving hands, greedily resting until the very last 
possible moment, when she heard somebody descend¬ 
ing the stairs from the third floor. A knock sound¬ 
ed on her door. Suspecting it was Jim, she arose, 
slipped into her dressing-gown and opened the door. 
She saw Jim’s wide shoulders blocking the light. 
She also saw that he was very much excited about 
something. 

“Tess, I’ve heard from Detroit,” he told her. 
‘They’re interested. They want me to come right 
out there while they hold tests on my carburetor. 
See—here’s the letter.” 

He handed the crumpled sheet to her and she 
rubbed her sleepy eyes and read it. 

“That sounds fine. Are you going?” 

He nodded. “On the Wolverine at five this 
afternoon. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it 
I’m going to try to get permission from the boss 
for the time off, and if he crabs, I’m going to chuck 
up my job. It’s worth it. This is big-time stuff, 
Tess.” 

She shivered a little. 

“I can’t stand here talking to you in these clothes,”" 
she protested. “I’ll get dressed in a hurry and see 
you at breakfast.” 


MANHANDLED 


259 


His excitement was infectious. By the time they 
had finished their meal and were traveling down¬ 
town in the Subway together, she was listening with 
intent and narrowed eyes to his repeated but still 
perplexing ideas on vaporization projectors and gas¬ 
oline. 

She rushed out early to be on time to see him 
off at the Grand Central that afternoon. Hurrying 
through the moiling crowds, she caught sight of 
his bulky figure standing anxiously beside a veteran 
suit-case in front of the iron-grilled gate labeled 
“Wolverine Express.” His clothes were cheap and 
needed pressing. His hair was unkempt, and his 
worried glance as it moved here and there in search 
of her carried little of the assured confidence of a 
man about to negotiate the business deal that would 
make or break him forever. But she achieved a 
bold enough front as she greeted him. 

“Don’t let these people put anything over on you, 
Jim,” she urged with all the sophistication she im¬ 
agined her own knocking about in the business-world 
had given her. 

“Don’t worry,” he stiffened. “I’m not the usual 
boob-inventor. If they want to do business with 
me, they’ll pay.” 

She was encouraged. Perhaps it was the clothes, 
after all. If there had been time, she would have 


26 o 


MANHANDLED 


bullied him into buying an entirely new outfit, forc¬ 
ing him to borrow the money from her if necessary. 
For clothes always counted. 

“But how about you ?” He turned to her grave¬ 
ly, almost timidly. “You won't let anybody put 
anything over on you while I’m away, will you?” 

“Don’t worry,” she laughed in turn. “I’m not 
one of these boob country-girls, up to the city to 
see the fair.” 

He did not fancy that laugh. There was some¬ 
thing metallic, something defensively hard about it. 
It wasn’t Tess’s old frank and merry laugh. 

“I may be gone a month or so,” he explained wist¬ 
fully. “They’ll want to tear the thing apart and 
put it together again, and hold all kinds of tests.” 
He hesitated, cleared his throat. “You won’t let 
any of these rich guys rush you off your feet while 
I’m gone, will you, Tess?” 

It was one of the few times he had mentioned 
her other men friends. “You’ll be waiting for me 
—clean—won’t you, just as you’ve always been?” 

“Why not?” 

The attendant at the gate was consulting his 
watch and hooking up all but one of the restraining 
chains across the polished entrance-rails. Jim took 
her hand, in spite of the coldness of her last ques- 


MANHANDLED 261 

tion. Leaving her had drained some of his confi¬ 
dence away. 

“I may put this over, ,, he urged. “There’s a 
good chance I’ll come back with a paper in my 
pocket that’ll mean I’m out of the side-street class. 
If I do, Tess, will you marry me? Will you?” 

She lowered her head. 

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. 

He was disappointed. He was also hurt. But 
he kept on, edging a little nearer the gate. “You 
care for me, don’t you?” 

She raised her face. 

“I think so.” Then, pouring all the doubt and 
confusion of the past months into her voice, “Oh, 
Jim, it’s so hard to know for sure.” And flinging 
her arms around his neck, she kissed him quickly 
and thrust him away from her, just ahead of the 
closing gate. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


S HE missed Jim. Indeed, absent, he seemed 
to exert more of an influence on her life than 
he had while she knew he was always just on the 
floor above her, available at her beck and call. 

For a week she did not make an engagement, 
telling herself half-humorously that she was being 
faithful to Jim, persuading herself that she was 
doing a little penance for his sake. She would not 
admit that the pace she had been leading, and even 
her job, was beginning to pall on her a trifle. Per¬ 
haps it was because of a recently conceived and per¬ 
sistent idea that her health was not so sound as it 
used to be and that the causes were late hours, 
nerves continually on edge, too rich food and too 
much tobacco-laden air. Perhaps, and more likely, 
she was slowly but surely getting a truer perspective 
upon herself. 

Whether due to her own uneasy imagination or 
not, men seemed no longer quite content with what 
she had to offer them—her beauty, her laughter, her 
wit, her occasional yielding with moderation to their 
desire to be nice to her—all that had thus far been 
sufficient to attract them to her side in flattering 
262 


MANHANDLED 


263 

numbers. A dangerous note was slowly but surely 
creeping in. Thorndyke was always reaching out 
for something as yet unrealized, something more 
ominous, and she had continually to keep on guard. 
Even the sluggish Garretson was restless. And 
Brandt, perhaps the best of the lot—just what did 
his morosely strange actions imply? 

Her job at the Maison Ricard was taking her— 
whither ? It was still based upon the same insecure 
foundation as before, more insecure than ever, she 
thought grimly, as she recalled Arno Ricard’s 
annoying attempts lately at familiarity. The nov¬ 
elty of Countess Patovska’s presence in the fashion¬ 
able establishment was wearing off. She had be¬ 
come a fixture with the fickle customers, like the 
mirrors and the mannequins. If she was to stay on 
there indefinitely, she concluded, it would be even 
more necessary to keep Ricard interested than it 
would be to keep the customers amused. She did 
not fancy playing that game with him. 

When Luther Swett got her out of bed on Sun¬ 
day morning to answer the telephone and reminded 
her of their engagement to drive out to Greenwich 
at three, her first impulse was to break the date. 
But it was a glorious, sunshiny day after nearly a 
month of gloomy weather. And she had been no¬ 
where for a fortnight. So she decided to yield. 


MANHANDLED 


264 

On the trip to Connecticut, Tess, seated beside 
Swett and the handsomely attired and rather super¬ 
cilious Verlyna Charette, found the banker a much 
more serious-minded man than she had expected. 
He questioned her about herself, and, withholding 
the details of her position at the Maison Picard, she 
told him of her crippled ambition to be an artist, 
about her neglected work at Brandt’s studio. 

He listened intently, watching her face as she 
talked. He was equally reserved on the ride home 
after the bride and groom (both of whom were 
veteran survivors of three or four similar mating 
ceremonies) had consumed his adroitly ordered sup¬ 
per and in a shower of rice had departed for New 
York. 

But after Swett had dropped Verlyna at her 
Riverside Drive apartment and was proceeding east¬ 
ward toward Mrs. Binner’s, he loosened up a little. 
When he was about to leave her at her house-door, 
his passiveness slipped away entirely. 

“It’s just occurred to me, my dear, that I can get 
you into a better neighborhood than this,” he said 
with fatherly matter-of-factness. “This really 
won’t do, you know!” 

Tess’s gesture, as she inspected the diminishing 
row of ash-cans, was one of hopelessness. 

“I’ve a portrait-painter friend named Nast, Ken- 







Paramount Picture. Manhandled 

“ CUTTING IN ” WAS THE ORDER AT RICARD’S PARTY. 




































MANHANDLED 


265 

dal Nast, who’s just off for Europe,” explained 
Swett. “He has a studio in a building of mine on 
Fifty-seventh Street. It’s not a bad little place. 
And it’s standing there empty and waiting for some¬ 
body to look after it” 

Her pulse quickened, in spite of herself. 

“Do you mean you’re offering me the use of this 
place ?” she asked as quickly as she was able. 

“I imagine you would be doing Nast a service in 
looking after his things through the spring and 
summer,” Swett casually reminded her. 

“But that,” she demurred, “would leave me under 
such an obligation to you.” 

“It’s Nast’s studio, not mine,” he pointed out. 
“I’m merely passing it on to you if you care to use 
it.” 

“But that would be taking something for noth¬ 
ing,” she still objected, disturbed by some deep- 
seated voice of instinct that would not down. 

“I think you deserve it,” proclaimed her quiet¬ 
voiced benefactor. 

“But that’s just the trouble. I don’t. And I’d 
still be too much in your debt.” 

“You could get rid of that very easily,” he an¬ 
nounced. 

“How?” she asked, with an unconscious sharp¬ 
ening of the voice. 


269 


MANHANDLED 


His urbanity, apparently, was unshakable. 

“By letting me drop in on you now and then, 
when you’ve an idle hour. Don’t misunderstand 
me, my dear. I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance and 
I’d come only when I was definitely asked. But at 
my age one has rather a love for quietness and color. 
And where you are there always seems to be color.” 

“It’s mostly blue, these last few days,” she ad¬ 
mitted with her temporizing small laugh. “No, 
your offer is very kind and I’m grateful for it, but 
I don’t think I can accept.” 

He shrugged resignedly and assisted her with 
solicitous gallantry from the car. 

During the next few weeks, as February slid 
damply into March and the first few touches of 
spring warmth began timidly to appear, she won¬ 
dered many times if she had not been unwise and 
over-scrupulous not to accept Swett’s offer. Cer¬ 
tainly her loyalty to her present abode was not due 
to any contentedness with it. For Mrs. Binner 
and the slatternly maid, the latter obviously under 
the landlady’s orders, had for a long time been sub¬ 
jecting Tess to a guerrilla warfare of petty annoy¬ 
ances. Her bed was slovenly made or not at all. 
Packages for her were deliberately mislaid or given 
by alleged mistake to other persons. She began 
missing things. At meals she was favored with 


MANHANDLED 


267- 

the least desirable and most miserly portions of 
everything. It was only the sentimental associa¬ 
tion of Jim with the place and the desire that he 
should find her there when he came back from De¬ 
troit that held her. 

She received letters from Jim every day or so. 
The fate of the carburetor was in doubt. The com¬ 
pany was still holding tests. They had constructed 
several duplicates of his mechanism, with him in an 
advisory role, and were trying them out on all pos¬ 
sible models of cars. They had called in expert 
engineers from their other factories, and they were 
withholding their final reports. From his series of 
letters Tess could have constructed a maddeningly 
fluctuating graph of alternate optimism and gloom. 
Meantime, he was staying in Detroit, on the Detroit 
Accessories Company’s pay-roll and working with 
the engineers who were making the tests. He had 
no idea when the verdict would be announced. He 
was making more money than he had in New York, 
but he was fearfully anxious to have it over with 
and to be with her, he wrote. 

Her own hopes rose and fell in sympathy with 
his, for his sake. How deeply his success or failure 
concerned her own future, she hardly dared ask 
herself. The problem it opened was too big. 

Jim, expecting when he left New York to be back 


268 


MANHANDLED 


in a few days, had not given up his room at Mrs. 
Binner’s, and Tess had been looking after it for him 
against his return, putting his belongings under lock 
and key, taking care of his mail, even replacing his 
faded curtains with bright new chintz ones and safe¬ 
guarding the suit of clothes he had left behind by 
installing it in a moth-proof bag. 

The Monday on which Tess and Mrs. Binner came 
to the final parting of the ways dawned with a 
preliminary clash between them. Tess’s laundry 
consignment of clean underthings was nowhere to 
be found. Impatiently calling for Mrs. Binner and 
the maid eventually revealed the fact that the bag 
had for no reason at all been deposited in the room 
across the way, which was occupied by a burlesque 
;soubrette, a friend of Walters. 

Words flew between boarder, mistress and maid 
and ceased only when Tess had to hurry down to 
breakfast and to work. 

After dinner that night, Tess, as was her custom, 
\ ran up to Jim’s room for possible mail. Even be¬ 
fore she reached his door, she had a feeling that the 
room was occupied. With a mixture of joy over 
the possibility that it was Jim and of mystification, 
for nobody had mentioned his return and he had 
certainly not entered the house since her arrival from 


MANHANDLED 269 

work, she pushed open the door and immediately- 
stepped back in surprise. 

A red-faced, rough-looking young stranger was 
sitting on the bed in his shirt-sleeves and unpacking 
a suit-case packed with rumpled clothes. Sighting 
her and evidently believing that this was a marvelous 
boarding-house he had picked, what with a striking¬ 
ly pretty girl popping in on him thus unannounced, 
he grinned boldly and saluted her, “Hello, kid. 
Come in.” 

Tess, flushed from anger more than confusion, 
for she grasped the situation in a twinkling, slammed 
the door and flew down to Mrs. Binner, who stood, 
arms akimbo, in the hallway below, evidently ex¬ 
pecting some such eventuality. 

“Have you rented Mr. Hogan’s room to some 
one else?” Tess stormed. 

“I didn’t know as he was cornin’ back,” Mrs. Bin¬ 
ner snapped. “His rent ain’t been paid for three 
weeks.” 

“Why didn’t you remind me ?” demanded the girl. 
“You knew I’d have paid it.” She started to pass 
Mrs. Binner and go to her own room for her 
pocketbook. “I’ll pay it now.” 

“It’s too late,” the landlady stoutly asserted. 
“The room’s rented. And I don’t think you've got 


270 MANHANDLED 

any right or reason to dictate to me about my 
boarders.” 

“What do you mean?” Tes9 asked with dangerous 
quietness. 

“Just what I said. You’re no gentle dove your¬ 
self.” 

Slowly but steadily Tess’s Celtic rose. She 
whitened and advanced upon the flabby Mrs. Bin- 
ner, advanced until the latter stepped backward and 
reached blindly for the newel-post at the head of 
the stairs, prepared to flee. 

“You loose-tongued old scandalmonger,” Tess 
blazed. “I’ve taken from you all I’m going to. 
Now I’m through. I’ll get out in the morning and 
I’ll take Mr. Hogan’s stuff with me. And if I 
wasn’t afraid of soiling my hands on you, I’d wring 
your neck!” 

And abandoning the pallid Mrs. Binner, Tess 
Lurried to her room, whipped the door shut with a 
bang and flung herself, weeping from excitement 
and nervous strain, upon her bed. 

The next morning, having spent an all but sleep¬ 
less night, she realized the necessity for crossing her 
Rubicon. She called Luther Swett on the telephone 
and said, as calmly as she could, “If your offer to 
have me use Mr. Nast’s studio apartment still holds 
good, I’ll be glad to accept it.” 


MANHANDLED 


271 

“I’m glad you’re being reasonable,” was the re¬ 
tarded answer over the wire. 

A note from him, the next day, announced that 
the arrangements had all been made and that the 
keys would be delivered to Tess, by the resident en¬ 
gineer, on demand. Her benefactor hoped that 
she would be comfortable in her new quarters. He 
further hoped that, if she met with any difficulties, 
she would not hesitate to call him up on his return 
to the city, which he was leaving for a few days 
on a business-trip. 

Tess’s last scruples vanished, at the impersonality 
of that brief but kindly note. They returned, it is 
true, when she found herself confronted by the un¬ 
expected luxuriousness of the studio-apartment, with 
cut-flowers on her Louis Quinze writing-desk and a 
satin carton of bonbons on the teakwood trivet be¬ 
side her chaise longue. She shivered with womanly 
joy at the white-tiled purity and privacy of the 
diminutive bathroom, after Mrs. Binner’s communal 
bathing-den with the residuary lather-lines about its 
tub. She thrilled foolishly at the beauty of the toy¬ 
like sleeping-quarters, all done in old rose and ivory, 
and seemed to inhale from its narrow casement- 
window a rarer and lighter air, enjoying even the 
carbon-monoxide that floated up from the motor- 
exhausts of the ever-murmurous street. It was an 


MANHANDLED 


272 

odor thaf kept reminding her she had crept a little 
closer to the core of things. And there was happi¬ 
ness in being at the core of things. 

Along the horizon of her happiness, however, 
lurked one small cloud which she could not define, 
one vague trouble which she refused to articulate. 
She had told Jim all about her change of residence 
in an impassioned six-page letter while her wrath 
against Mrs. Binner was running high and before 
she had begun to think about what accepting Swett’s 
proposal really meant. Even at that, she now ad¬ 
mitted, her letter had been rather guardedly worded 
in spots. She had given Jim her address, it is true, 
but she avoided all speculation on what he might 
think of the betrayingly fashionable sound of it ? 

But when, that first night of lonely unrest, in the 
sudden conscientious determination to resume her 
long-neglected art-work she let herself into Brandt’s 
studio with her key and the artist himself dashed 
back for a half-hour between dinner and an alleged 
conference over a new commission, she was reluc¬ 
tant to explain her migration from Mrs. Binner’s. 

ff Your work is very slovenly,” he commented 
brutally, standing beside her a few moments and 
watching her daubs. “You don’t spend enough 
time on it.” 

When she glanced up, about to make a sharp 


MANHANDLED 


273 


retort, the look in his eyes told her he was thinking 
more about her than he was about the poorly exe¬ 
cuted place-card9. And that both stirred and 
alarmed her. 

“You're never here to help me any more,” she 
complained. “I'd come every night this week, and 
work like a dog, if you'd only give me a hand.” 

He hesitated, regarding her intently. “All right,” 
he finally agreed. 

But the next evening Garretson appeared with a 
suggestion to see Chariot's Revue, which had been 
praised to her as the cleverest show in town. She 
found it hard to resist. In the end, in fact, she 
yielded. And with that mood of recklessness still 
on her, she decided to explain both her absence and 
her change of residence to the artist. 

Over the telephone she found it much easier to 
talk to Brandt and explain what at first had seemed 
inexplicable. Yet he stood so long in silence after 
she had done her best to make everything about her 
presence in Nast's apartment clear that she thought 
he had hung up the receiver. It was only after 
her repeated call to him that she heard his voice 
again. And then he merely said, “You know best.” 

Tess's brow was clouded as she housed her trans¬ 
mitter in the flounced Madame Pompadour that 
made up her telephone-screen. But the vague trouble 


MANHANDLED 


274 

at the root of her triumph did not definitely outline 
itself until Luther Swett, almost a week later, called 
her up on what proved to be his private wire. He 
inquired, paternally enough, if everything had been 
made comfortable for her. He asked, almost as 
an after-thought, if he might venture to drop in for 
a moment or two on his way up-town that evening. 

That request, formal and perfunctory as it sound¬ 
ed, disturbed her veiy much. It seemed to be the 
first confirmation of a misgiving that was growing 
within her by the hour, not only about her occu¬ 
pancy of Swett’s apartment but about her whole 
mode of living. 

“I’m sorry,” was her slightly tremulous reply 
over the wire, “but I’ve a business engagement im¬ 
mediately with Mr. Brandt.” 

“You wouldn’t care to slip out of that for me?” 
he suggested. 

“I’m afraid not.” 

“Well, youth calls unto youth the same as deep 
calls unto deep,” she heard the blithely forlorn voice 
saying to her. “But when you’re being happy with 
the young, my dear, don’t altogether forget the old. 
I want to talk to you, when the chance comes, about 
what may be a real help to you in your art-work.” 

“I feel you’ve already helped me too much,” pro¬ 
tested the none too happy Tess. 


MANHANDLED 


275 


“That’s the finest thing life gives us old fellows,” 
was Luther Swett’s somewhat wistfully uttered re¬ 
ply. “Every now and then it lets an old has-been 
like me give a hand-up to a young would-be like 
you. But I don’t want to be a blundering nuisance 
about it. So when you have an empty hour, my 
dear, give me a ring and let me know.” 

She thanked him with a forced lightness of note 
that did not go well with the unsteadiness of her 
hand as she hung up the receiver. She sat staring 
down at the flounced Madame Pompadour, trying 
to fortify herself with the thought that it had all 
been formal and perfunctory, that it was all based 
on one of those impersonal and generous impulses 
with which life occasionally confronts one. 

But there was something in front of her, some¬ 
thing just beyond the next turn in her tangled road 
of life, of which she stood wordlessly afraid. 


CHAPTER XIX 


B Y the middle of April, Tess had become con¬ 
vinced that her continuance in the role of 
Countess Patovska at the Maison Ricard was soon 
to become entirely dependent upon the response she 
made to the perfumed Gallic proprietor's increasing¬ 
ly embarrassing attempts to shower attentions upon 
her. Yet money, more than ever before, was es¬ 
sential to her. Her connection with the celebrated 
gown-establishment could have ended at once, but 
for that problem of money. For, though the item 
of clothes was automatically eliminated from her 
pecuniary worries by the fact that her apparel in all 
but a few essentials was furnished by the Maison 
Ricard, she had discovered that living in the studio 
of Mr. Swett’s friend, Kendal Nast, entailed a much 
larger expenditure than did her modest quarters at 
Mrs. Binner’s. There were tips to be continually 
distributed. There were appearances to keep up. 
Adapting the apartment in a few details from mas¬ 
culine to feminine tenancy had also involved ex¬ 
penses. And one did not go from such luxurious 
surroundings to breakfast at basement automats 
276 


MANHANDLED 277 

or return there from dinner at Child’s. In short, 
Tess needed the seventy-five dollars a week Ricard 
was paying her, and she saw no immediate prospect 
of securing that much compensation somewhere else. 

But the job had developed into a burdensome and 
unprofitable bore. The ever-changing kaleidoscope 
of expensive clothes paraded before her no longer 
held its original thrill. The conversation of Ricard’s 
rich customers was not even as entertaining as that 
of Pinkie Doran. She knew her Russian role by 
heart and played it automatically, with her mind 
upon Jim and other things less important than him. 

Thus, the first incident upon that eventful mid- 
April day which later turned out to be the most 
fateful twenty-four hours of her life, did not at the 
time greatly disturb her. 

Soon after the shop opened, a tall, masculine¬ 
looking woman with a loud and bullying voice came 
bustling in. She was sailing for Europe in five 
days, she broadcast to Monsieur Ricard and his 
staff, and, by the force and bustle of her voice and 
personality, soon had practically the whole per¬ 
sonnel of the place dashing about in her service. 
Madame Aug satisfied Tess’s semi-aroused curiosity 
by whispering, between flights hither and yon, that 
the customer was Jane Dobell, the famous society- 
woman journalist, who had been many times around 


MANHANDLED 


278 

the world, hobnobbed with the creme-de-la-creme of 
practically every civilized land, and from these high 
authorities had gleaned endless material for her 
writings. Incidentally, Mrs. Dobell for the past 
ten years had been specializing on Russia. 

It was not until the writer, out of breath with 
her activities, sank into a chair beside her and 
craved tea that Tess saw in her a possible menace. 

“Countess Patovska?” Mrs. Dobell paused over 
her steaming glass, and gazed penetratingly at Tess. 
“I do not recall the name. And I flatter myself 
that I am acquainted with all the Russian names 
of nobility of any importance.” 

Tess parried this quickly by raising her chin a 
trifle arrogantly and clouding her voice with her 
strongest accent, “I beg pardone. I ’av ver’ few 
Englese.” 

Whereupon the famous journalist astonished her 
by promptly breaking, with hoarse and tremulous 
voice, into a torrent of what Tess assumed to be 
Russian. When the babel stopped, Mrs. Dobell 
looked expectantly for a response. Inwardly hor¬ 
ror-stricken, the girl’s nimble wit suggested the only 
recourse that seemed possible to save her. She 
rose unsteadily, staggered forward, and promptly 
started to weep as if her heart would break. Ricard, 
attracted already by the possibility of trouble, caught 


MANHANDLED 279 

the significance of Tess’s hand, waving frantically 
behind her back out of sight of the sharp-eyed Mrs. 
Dobell. Hurrying up to Tess, he put a fatherly 
and protective arm about her heaving shoulders and 
explained to the astonished writer, “Poor Countess 
Patovska! Poor child—she can not endure any 
reference to her unhappy country. She always 
breaks down. I should have warned you.” 

And before a protest or a note of sympathy could 
issue from the mouth of Mrs. Dobell, he led Tess, 
still moaning, from the display-room into his pri¬ 
vate office. There she sank with profound relief 
into the massive depths of a leather-upholstered 
chair and slid back the turban from her perspiring 
brow. 

I thought the job was up for keeps,” she ac¬ 
knowledged with a nervous laugh. 

“You saved yourself very nicely,” said Ricard, 
sliding on to the broad arm of the chair beside her 
and allowing his arm to rest carelessly on the back 
of the chair, very near to her. He was evidently 
anxious to replace his arm where it had been when 
he led her out of danger. She moved forward a 
little in the chair. 

“Thanks to you,” she smiled. 

“Perhaps I could be of service to you often, if 
you would only permit me,” he said significantly. 


28 o 


MANHANDLED 


Then frankly patting his arm around her, he added, 
“Why do you always avoid me? Why don't you 
accept my invitations ?" 

She was never in her life so grateful for an in¬ 
terruption to a tete-a-tete as she was by the discreet 
knock on the door and the subsequent entrance of 
Madame Aug bearing a card. The card was for 
Tess. It contained the engraved cognomen of Mr. 
Charles Everett Thorndyke and had scrawled upon 
it in pencil, “Hello, Countess. How about dinner 
and a show to-night? Chip." 

She looked up to find Ricard brazenly reading the 
card over her shoulder. Discovered, he asked care¬ 
lessly, “Is Thorndyke a particular friend of yours?" 

“He's a friend." 

“Not a very close one, I hope. He's a bad fel¬ 
low with the ladies, you know." 

Tess laughed merrily. “That's funny. He said 
the same thing about you. So did Bob Brandt. 
And Chip warned me Bob was also a devil along 
the same lines. You men must all belong to the 
same club." 

Ricard had been thinking of something else. 

“I wonder,” he said, looking at her in a way that 
labeled what he was going to say almost an order, 
“if you and Thorndyke would care to come around 
to my apartment to-night. I’m giving a party. 


MANHANDLED 


281 

Just a few good friends, men and women. Regular 
people, all of them. That is, provided you wouldn’t 
rather chuck him altogether and let me call for 
you. You haven’t been treating me at all well, you 
know, in spite of all I have done for you. I am 
particularly anxious for you to come to-night. Will 
you?” 

Politely and discreetly worded as the invitation 
was, she perceived that here was very nearly an 
ultimatum. She had an impulse to rise and refuse. 

But she lacked the courage. She was not free. 
She had the future to think of. After all, it wouldn’t 
mean anything tragic to accept. She would have 
Thomdyke along as a protector, doubtful pilot 
though he might seem. 

“If you’ll promise to let me leave early—I’ll 
come,” she qualified her acceptance, and Ricard 
agreed. She wrote “Okay. Party at Ricard’s apart¬ 
ment. Call for me at nine. ‘Countess.’ ” 

The sly satisfaction she observed written on 
Ricard’s face haunted her the rest of the day. 

Tess had hardly returned to her rooms from 
dinner at a near-by tea-shop, and was just settling 
wearily into a chair after looking in vain for a let¬ 
ter from Jim as she had been doing with a similar 
lack of success ever since moving from Mrs. Bin- 
ner’s, when the bell buzzed. 


282 


MANHANDLED 


She opened the door. An impressive-looking 
woman in an iridescent brown turban and severely 
brown tailored suit was standing on the threshold. 

It was Verlyna Charette. She seemed as much 
surprised to find Tess confronting her as Tess was 
to see her. 

“You’re not living here, surely?” questioned the 
older woman. “I saw the lights as I was passing 
in my car on the way to the theater. I was a trifle 
curious to know who could be in the studio. It 
holds a memory or two of mine—and I thought it 
was empty. Are you really living here, my dear?” 

“Why not?” asked Tess, with an attempted smile 
that for some reason failed to register. 

“But I happen to know this studio,” said the 
smartly-clad Miss Charette, with a second pro¬ 
longed and slightly bewildered stare about her. 
“May I come in for a moment?” 

“Of course,” was Tess’s answer. “Then you are 
a friend of Kendal Nast’s?” 

“No, I’m not,” w r as the oddly delayed reply. “But 
I’m a friend of Luther Swett’s.” 

“He’s been very kind to me,” said the girl with 
the gardenia-white skin, to bridge the silence that 
ensued. Yet she wondered why this resplendent 
and slightly faded beauty should be staring at her 
with eyes as sad and discerning as an old hound’s. 


MANHANDLED 283 

“Are you a good girl?” was the older woman’s 
quiet and unexpected query. 

“What do you mean by a good girl?” asked the 
other, tingling with the thought that she was parry¬ 
ing for time and not looking for information. 

“I don’t need to answer that. Are you?” 

“I’ve always tried to be,” answered Tess, the last 
of her color gone. 

“Are you trying now?” 

“What is to prevent me?” 

The older woman did not answer that question. 
But her meditative eyes remained fixed on the oth¬ 
er’s face as she sank into a chair. 

“I’m just wondering how clever you are,” said 
the woman with the lines of life which even her 
make-up could not obliterate. 

“I don’t pretend to be clever,” said the girl with 
the troubled violet eyes. 

“But could you pretend to be the other thing, in 
a setting like this?” inquired Miss Charette as her 
meditative eyes ranged about the orientalized studio 
with its rug-draped divan and its hammered brass 
lamps. 

“In a setting like this?” repeated Tess, trying 
to understand. And she was conscious of the dis¬ 
cerning cool eyes being once more fixed on her face. 

“Does this impress you as the sort of studio a 


284 


MANHANDLED 


man has lived in? The sort a man would live 
in?” questioned the older woman. 

“I never thought much about that,” admitted the 
other, the color once more mounting to her thin 
cheek. 

“I’m afraid there are quite a number of things 
you haven’t thought about,” Tess’s visitor reminded 
her. 

“Do you mean I’ve done wrong in coming here ?” 
challenged the girl. 

“I mean it could be very sadly misunderstood,” 
was the deliberately cool reply. 

“It could never be misunderstood by the people 
who really know me,” protested the other, “or who 
really know Mr. Swett.” 

“I know Mr. Swett,” was Miss Charette’s ap¬ 
parently inapposite reply. 

“But this studio was empty, and he had no use 
for it,” explained Tess, wondering why she should 
be standing on the defensive. “He has never said 
or done a questionable thing, from that night I first 
met him—that night when you were with him. He 
has been nothing but kind and generous, always.” 

The older woman moved her head slowly up and 
down. “There are kindnesses, my dear, that can 
eventually prove very cruel.” 


MANHANDLED 285 

The unhappy girl swung about, at that, with a 
sudden hard light in her eyes. 

“But Luther Swett is a friend of yours,” she 
proclaimed. 

“He is—with reservations. And I'm rather fond 
of him, with the same reservations. I'm not accus¬ 
ing him, remember. And I know that young girls 
nowadays aren’t asking to be either guided or guard¬ 
ed—all they’re demanding is freedom. But I once 
heard of a big game hunter who waited three years 
to get a particular head he wanted.” 

“I don’t see what that has to do with me,” pro¬ 
tested the girl with the startled eyes. 

“No; you don’t, or you wouldn’t be here,” re¬ 
plied the older woman as she rose to her feet. “Sup¬ 
pose I were to tell you that there is no such person 
as Kendal Nast, that this apartment has never been 
occupied by any one but Luther Swett and his—” 

“I don’t believe you!” cried Tess, but without 
conviction. 

“Very well,” shrugged the actress. “But it’s true. 
You might ask your friend Brandt to verify it.” 

There was fierceness in Tess’s gesture as she 
swung about on her visitor. 

“You’ve made this place so I can’t live in it,” 
she cried out, with almost a look of hate on her 


286 MANHANDLED 

face. But a smile lurked about the other woman’s 
eyes, still sad and discerning as an old hound’s. 

“That’s the most promising thing you could pos¬ 
sibly say,” was Miss Charette’s quiet-noted reply. 
“I’m old enough to be your mother, my dear, and 
I’ve been through the mill. We all want to be free, 
but we can’t. The best we can do is to remember 
Eliza and keep out on the ice a few jumps ahead 
of the bloodhounds.” 

The woman of the theater moved toward the 
stricken girl, with her gloved hand outstretched. 
But Tess drew away from that contact. She crossed 
the room and stood beside the window, very lonely, 
very remote, but oddly courageous. 

“I see it, now,” she said, in little more than a 
whisper. 

The woman drew the folds of her scarf closer 
about her. 

“Then I’ve nothing more to say,” she asserted as 
she turned and moved toward the door. She stopped, 
on her way out, and looked back. “Good-by, my 
dear, and good luck,” she murmured, as though to 
give selvage to a scene that threatened to remain 
without its due dramatic finish. 

But Tess did not seem to hear her. She sank 
into a chair with her unsteady fingers locked to¬ 
gether on her narrow lap. 


MANHANDLED 


287 

It seemed very quiet in the studio. And she 
seemed alone in a world that had toyed with her 
and betrayed her and forgotten her. 

She sat there for a long time. She felt no re¬ 
sentment against Verlyna Charette, even though, as 
Tess suspected, jealousy had been the motive of the 
actress's visit. Verlyna had set before her in cold 
words what she had been afraid to tell herself. It 
was simply the first warped fruit of the false harvest 
she had been sowing almost from the day she landed 
in New York. And in that moment she longed as 
never before for Jim Hogan. Her balance-wheel. 
The man she—yes—loved. She knew now that she 
loved him with all her heart Why didn’t he come ? 
She had left word with both the day and night at¬ 
tendants in the corridor to summon her if a man 
named Hogan called, no matter when it was, and if 
she were not there, to open the door to him with 
their pass-key. And she had given them a minute 
description of Jim, refusing to notice their know¬ 
ingly raised eyebrows. Why hadn’t he written? 
Was her presence in this damnable place tearing 
him away from her, keeping him from writing her? 
She got up and paced the room, now suddenly grown 
hateful to her, and sat down again, nervously twist¬ 
ing her fingers. 

And it was thus, a few minutes after nine, that 


288 


MANHANDLED 


Chip Thomdyke’s merry tinkling of her bell found 
her. It was a full minute before the memory of her 
engagement with Thomdyke and of Ricard’s party 
came to her confused brain. Her first impulse then 
was either to refuse to answer the bell or to dis¬ 
miss him on any excuse that came to her. But 
why? It might save her to go. It might drive 
back those bounding tides of self-hate. She would 
leave this place, forever, in the morning a9 well as 
she could to-night. 

And so she opened the door to Chip and kept 
him grumbling and spilling cigarette-ashes every¬ 
where, while she dressed. 

“What’s the matter, kid ?” he asked carelessly, as 
he led her out to his can “You’re not looking so 
chipper. Let’s chuck Ricard’s shindig and shoot 
out into the country.” 

“No, thanks, Chip,” she answered, forcing a wan 
smile. “I promised him I’d come. And promises 
ought to be kept.” 

“All right,” he sighed, stretching his long form 
beside her in the tonneau of the limousine as his 
chauffeur was pressing the starter. “I understand 
he gives some rare old affairs—classy chickens and 
pre-war hootch. Suits me, if I can’t have you to 
myself.” 

It was ten before Ricard, the scent of his favorite 


MANHANDLED 


289 


perfume already copiously flavored with alcohol and 
his small eyes somewhat watery and bloodshot, 
opened the door to them. By the time she had dis^ 
carded her wraps in the smoke-blue air of the room 
assigned to the ladies and walked out into the living- 
room of Ricard’s ornate apartment and taken an ap¬ 
praising look around, she was quite sure she was 
in for a hectic time. The party in Brandt’s studio, 
where she had first met her employer, she saw at 
a glance, had been a tame Girl Scouts’ outing com¬ 
pared to this. Ricard’s crowd, both male and fe¬ 
male, was older, rougher, noisier and far more dan¬ 
gerous. Liquor seemed to abound everywhere, and 
there was a dismaying plenitude of concealed nooks 
and comers where paired-off couples were quite 
blatantly making love. 

In five minutes the delighted Chip was right in 
the swing of it, dancing, flirting, joking, drinking 
with speed and abandon. 

As Tess stood uncertainly back, her disgust rising 
by the second, Ricard came hurrying unsteadily up 
to her, put his arm about her and announced, 
“C’mon, Tess. Want to intr’duce you to all these 
people. Fine bunch of boys and girls. You’ll like 
’em. Have a drink.” She declined the drink and 
was sorry she couldn’t do the same to his guests. 

Music burst forth from somewhere, and she found 


290 


MANHANDLED 


herself dancing with Ricard. But even the dancing 
was a rowdy, maudlin affair. The narrow cleared 
space was jammed, and cutting in was the order 
of the hour. Men in various states of intoxication 
mulled around her, shouting, grabbing for her, 
swinging her away from first one partner, then 
another. Thorndyke and Ricard disappeared from 
view in the welter. Her slippers were ruined, her 
hair disheveled, her clothes pulled awry, as old men, 
middle-aged men, young men, but all with hard, red, 
puffy faces, pressed their disgusting bodies against 
her and jerked her around the room under the name 
of dancing. 

Finally, when she was breathless and beaten from 
the unceasing whirl of it, after several dances and 
innumerable consistently refused offers of cocktails, 
Ricard found her again. He was further gone than 
before. He stood, in fact, utterly disgusting to 
her. Yet she permitted him to propel her out of 
the shouting, wrangling crowd into a divan in the 
foyer hall. Girls, she remembered, had their fu¬ 
tures to think of. 

“Been looking all over f’ you,” declared Ricard. 
“Want to talk with you—see. Privately. After 
the rest go, you stay—see?” His flushed face was 
near to her, his bloodshot eyes hard and packed 
with meaning. 


MANHANDLED 


291 


She recoiled a little. She rose and, fearing to 
look back, fairly ran from him. At the foot of the 
stairs she encountered Chip. But Chip was busy 
entertaining two giggling chorus-girls with a dis¬ 
play of crude and blowsy wit. He came, though 
reluctantly, when she motioned. 

“Take me home, Chip, will you please—now?” 
she begged. 

“Wha’ you 'fraid of, honey ?” 

“Em afraid—of Ricard. And, as you said, I 
don't feel well. Will you ?” 

Perhaps he read in her pleading, frightened 
eyes a predilection for his company alone. Or he 
assumed something equally alluring. 

“Oh, be a sport and stick around,” he parried, 
none the less. But in a few minutes, working des¬ 
perately and cleverly, she had won him. She dashed 
in for her wraps, and he met her at the foot of the 
stairs. And soon, to her infinite relief, she was 
away from the din and the danger, ensconced in the 
tonneau of Chip's car speeding up-town. 

Tess was tired, disillusioned, desiring nothing so 
much as to be left alone. It had been a mistake. 
She had turned to the wrong quarter for consola¬ 
tion. She could not even answer Chip's cheerful 
and half-drunken chattering. She pulled away from 
him as he pressed closer to her. If, on top of every- 


292 


MANHANDLED 


thing else, he should now get troublesome, she would 
scream, she felt. And in five minutes she became 
aware that to be troublesome was Chip’s exact 
plan. 

His groping hands had pushed the straps of the 
evening cloak from her bare shoulders, despite her 
efforts to replace it and hold him away. 

“Please, Chip,” she petitioned. “Not now.” 

His answer was to pull down the little roller 
shade that separated them from the chauffeur’s 
eyes. 

Suddenly he clutched her, with a new savagery. 
A wave of repugnance ran through her as she tried 
to free herself. But he was too strong. 

“No, no, please,” she panted, writhing to twist 
her face away from his lips. He kissed her full on 
the mouth, despite her efforts. 

“How dare you maul me like that? Why can’t 
you be a sport?” she cried, as soon as she recovered 
her breath. But he sat back, blinking, undisturbed 
in the face of her anger. 

“I am a sport. I’m leaving a perf’tly good party 
to take you home ’cause you’re not feeling well. 
That’s being a sport, isn’t it?” 

One arm was still around her rumpled waist. She 
shot a glance out of the car and saw that they were 
only three blocks from her home. If she could 


MANHANDLED 


293 

hold him off just a little longer, she knew she could 
escape. 

“ ’S little late for that up-stage stuff, don’t you 
think, li’l bob-cat?” he asked, eyes narrowed and 
face still close to hers. She knew then that she 
hated him. Her hate flamed higher as he seized 
her anew, wrenched her body toward him as she 
fought him wildly, kissed her with such brutal vio¬ 
lence that his teeth gashed her lips. Sobbing con¬ 
vulsively in spite of herself, she attacked him with 
the fierceness of a tigress, hurled him with a lucky 
concentration of vehemence for an instant to one 
side, flung the door of the car open, and a second 
later, the car slowing down momentarily to glide 
around her corner, sprang out a foot ahead of his 
madly groping fingers. A wild running career of 
half a block landed her at the heavy entrance-door 
to her apartment-house and, rushing past a hall- 
man astonished out of his sleepiness, she speared 
into her cloak-pocket for her key. 

Only when she had found it did she discover that 
her door was already half open and that another 
man’s face was peering down gravely at her from 
inside the room. 

Unbelievingly, out of tear-stained eyes, with her 
tousled hair a fitting setting for her fear-stricken 
face and her whole manhandled body fairly shouting 


294 


MANHANDLED 


things that ought not to be true, she stared at him. 
Then, with a little cry of relieved recognition and 
joy, she threw her arms around him and brought 
her harassed body to rest against his. 

“Jim l Jim,” she whispered. “You’ve come— 
Jim.” 


CHAPTER XX 


A LE the way back from Detroit, Jim had been 
debating whether he would go to her. For 
he had read the odious thing between the lines in 
her letter about her acceptance of Luther Swett’s 
offer of the luxurious studio-apartment that Tess’s 
own blindness had not seen until Verlyna Charette 
opened her eyes. And he had unjustly but naturally 
given Tess credit for knowing what she was doing 
at the time she accepted. It wounded him, angered 
him. It made him stop writing to her, made him 
wish he had never loved her, made him almost wish 
she was dead and buried. 

It took the edge entirely from his triumph when 
he was notified that, after long weeks of body- 
wearying work and brain-wearying worry, his car¬ 
buretor had been finally accepted. When he had 
stood in the Grand Central that night, the precious 
paper that would make him wealthy under the gen¬ 
erous royalty arrangement resting safely in his 
pocket, he waited for a full ten minutes in the midst 
of the eddying crowds, pathetically wondering what 
to do. The worry hadn’t slipped from his head 
295 


MANHANDLED 


296 

with the acceptance of his invention, as he had been 
promising himself it would. It beat against his 
brain more heavily than ever. 

Something veiy powerful, something he couldn’t 
quite explain, had driven him into the subway and 
up to this hateful cement-and-marble pile to Tess. 
He hardly heard the smartly uniformed doorman 
incredulously ask him, for some unknown reason, 
“Mr. Hogan ?” and smile and open the door and set 
his bag down inside this cool and delicately shaded 
little paradise of an apartment. He had doggedly 
told himself he would wait an hour for her, listen 
to what she had to say for herself—though what 
could she have to say?—then tell her, keeping his 
temper if possible, what he thought of her, and 
go away. He’d pour out the acids that were cor¬ 
roding his soul, and then beat it, damn it, forever. 

So Jim had stood at Tess’s window, peering up 
and down the 'black street. Then suddenly had 
come that madly flying streak of white out of the 
lurching limousine. A tom and disheveled woman, 
followed for a moment by a drunken man. And 
that woman was Tess, the Tess he had once thought 
good. He had not pulled the door wholly open 
before she was there beside him, clutching him, sob¬ 
bing and calling out his name. 

The maelstrom of emotions within Jim Hogan’s 



A Paramount Picture . Manhandled 

AS THE TAXI SLOWED DOWN, TESS LEAPED OUT. 


















MANHANDLED 


297 


breast set his face twitching. He wouldn’t look at 
her, crying. He was afraid of what he would do. 
It would be dead wrong, he tortured himself, yield¬ 
ing an inch to her now. It was too late: She had 
deliberately done him dirt, had done herself dirt, 
and—* 

He drew her grimly into the room and shut the 
door. Then he held her drooping mauled body at 
arms’ length and peered, teeth-gritted, into her face. 
Recovering fast, she was trying bravely now to 
smile and to show her pleasure at his coming. 

“Oh, Jim,” she cried, “is everything all right? 
Did they take your carburetor? Are you—we 
rich?” 

“They took the carburetor,” he said slowly and 
deliberately, “but everything isn’t all right.” 

“Why, Jim? What’s wrong?” She clutched at 
him, a new fear assailing her. And he turned on 
her, his passion gathering force as it was released. 

“Everything—you—this place you’re living in. 
That’s what’s wrong. I asked you when I left to 
watch your step, to keep clean. And, by God, you 
haven’t! No girl can stay straight and hit the pace 
you’ve been going since I went away. I’m wise— 
at last. I saw what happened in that limousine. I 
know that car. Thomdyke used to keep it in our 
garage. Look at yourself—all shot to pieces— 


298 


MANHANDLED 


soiled and mauled! Look at this place you’re living 
in, the clothes you’re wearing, the other stuff in the 
closet over there! A girl like you don’t own that 
kind of stuff. She don’t own them honestly!” 

“Jim!” she gasped. “I wrote you how I got this 
place. And those clothes are borrowed from Ricard. 
They’re part of my job.” 

“And those finger-marks all over you,” he cried 
as he pointed savagely at the red scrapes and 
blotches on her arms. “Are they part of your job 
too?” 

His words snapped out like the lash of a whip. 
The harsh injustice of them, from Jim, abruptly 
stopped her weeping. They calmed her and enabled 
her to face him, wanting him, loving him, but stung 
into her own defense. 

“Don’t you love me any more, Jim?” she asked 
quietly. “Don’t you want me?” 

“No, by God, I don’t. You’re manhandled!” 
And still again he blurted out, “No.” Then he 
stared at her. His hands dropped helplessly to his 
sides. His mouth quivered as he said, “I don’t 
know. You’re like the goods you used to sell in 
Thorndyke’s basement. Mauled and manhandled, 
not clean and fresh like they were at first. You’re 
not the Tess I used to know; you’re not even the 
Tess you were when I left.” 


MANHANDLED 


299 


He looked at her hopelessly, the fire of anger 
dying out of his eyes, stricken now with the thought 
of losing her. For lose her he must. It would 
hurt. But these were things no straight man quib¬ 
bled over. 

“I get you, Jim,” replied Tess, her voice husky 
hut calm. Brandt, she remembered, had used the 
same words about her. She was manhandled. She 
was soiled. But she was pure at heart. “And the 
worst of it is,” she found herself saying to the 
white-faced Jim, “that every appearance shouts 
you’re right, and yet you’re dead wrong. I’ve 
played around with fire. I am manhandled. I’ve 
been foolish, crazy. I shouldn’t ever have entered 
this place, I know. I shouldn’t have trusted Chip 
and the rest. But I’m still as good and pure as I 
ever was.” 

“That would be hard to believe,” was Jim’s cold- 
noted retort. 

“If you really loved me, you’d have faith enough 
in me to believe,” she declared, with rising spirit. 
She was down, but she wouldn’t be trampled on. 

“If I really loved—God, if I didn’t really love 
you I wouldn’t give a damn what you were,” he 
cried vehemently. “I’d grab you, soiled or not, 
like those other woman-hunters. That’s the trouble 
—I wish to God I didn’t—” And he abruptly 


MANHANDLED 


300 

checked himself, snatched up his hat and bag, and 
started blindly for the door. 

“Jim,” she called after him, a strange light of 
understanding and sudden resolution in her eyes. 
“Where are you going?” 

He stopped and looked back. “I don’t know,” 
he said slowly. “Mrs. Binner’s, I guess.” 

“She’s taken away your room. I wrote you about 
that, you remember.” 

“I’ll go there anyway. She’ll put me up for the 
night.” 

It was not until he had the door open that her 
mind cleared and she suddenly called out, “Jim, if 
it will show I’m right will you come here to-morrow 
when I send for you?” 

She was like a drowning woman snatching at a 
straw, but her voice was firm and cool. 

“I don’t see—” 

“Will you come?” 

“When?” 

“To-morrow night.” 

What more did she want of him ? To taunt him ? 
But then he looked closely and saw the honest plead¬ 
ing in her eyes. He stood silent a moment. Then 
he said quietly, “Fll come” 


CHAPTER XXI 


B Y noon the next day, Tess, by working fever¬ 
ishly had all her things packed ready to leave 
Luther Swett’s studio. It was then that she went 
to the telephone and called up the too generous 
banker. 

“You asked me to tell you when I had a spare 
hour,” she reminded him. 

“Yes?” was the non-committal reply from Swett. 
“Could you come to the studio at nine o’clock 
to-night?” Tess asked, with an uncontrollable tre¬ 
molo in her throat. 

“Just what does that mean?” inquired the suave 
voice over the wire. 

“It means, I want to see you very, very badly,” 
was the girl’s answer, followed by a ponderable 
silence. 

“I’ll be there,” replied the still shrewdly non¬ 
committal voice. 

No warmer tone had crept into that answering 
voice, but it brought a faint chill to the listening 
girl’s body. 

Then with an odd hardening of her tired young 
301 


3°2 


MANHANDLED 


face she called up Carl Garretson and to him issued 
the same invitation. And after that she sent the 
same deliberately provocative message to Chip 
Thorndyke, Bob Brandt and Arno Ricard, ending 
up with an anxious reminder to Jim, phoned at the 
Binner supper-hour, that she was looking for him 
to keep his promise. 

It was Garretson who came first, that night, pro¬ 
claiming that she looked pale in her plain street- 
dress of blue jersey cloth. His eyes widened per¬ 
ceptibly as Bob Brandt stepped into the studio, and 
the perplexity of both men increased with the ad¬ 
vent of the stem-browed Jim, who gazed with open 
disapproval and a questioning appeal to Tess at 
the table so carefully laid for seven. That sense 
of inward tension grew still stronger with the en¬ 
trance of Chip Thorndyke, who searched the faces 
of the silent men and then smiled sardonically at 
the resolute-eyed young woman who watched the 
door as Luther Swett stepped quietly yet covertly 
into that somewhat puzzled circle. Arno Ricard 
sauntered in at last. 

“Please be seated, gentlemen,” said Tess, whose 
pallor had been succeeded by an oddly heightened 
splash of color across her cheek-bones. Yet she was 
able to smile a little at the hesitancy that betrayed 
itself as they gathered about her board. 


MANHANDLED 


303 


“It may seem odd that I should ask you all to 
come here, as I have,” she announced finally, “but 
I wanted this to be a meeting of my friends, of my 
friends who have tried to help me. It’s not easy 
to say what I’d like to say. But I feel that in ac¬ 
cepting your friendship I haven’t repaid you in the 
way you expect to be repaid. There seems to be a 
feeling that I brought things into your lives, some¬ 
thing, apparently, which has given some one of you, 
or all of you, a claim on me. And for the sake of 
my own pride, if you care to call it that, I want 
this thing put straight.” She turned to Garretson. 
“Have I ever done anything that would give you 
that claim?” 

Garretson colored under the directness of her 
gaze. 

“I don’t quite follow you,” he finally acknowl¬ 
edged. 

“You tried to pet me as you probably petted other 
girls you know. But did it ever go beyond that? 
I want you to be as honest as you would if you 
knew you were going to face your Maker before 
morning.” 

“No, it didn’t—worse luck!” admitted that candid 
hedonist. “I never even had a look-in.” 

“And you?” demanded the luminous-eyed girl, 
turning to Thorndyke. 


304 


MANHANDLED 


“I don’t see the purpose of this,” protested the 
latter, slightly flushed. “But if you’re asking if I 
know of anything that could keep you from being 
called an honorable girl, I can most positively say 
that I don’t What I do claim, though, is—” 

“And you ?” she asked, turning to Brandt. 

His smoldering eyes fixed upon her. “Now that 
the storm’s all over,” he said with a suspicion of a 
wry smile, “I don’t mind admitting I’ve wanted 
to take you in my arms and kiss you till it hurt ever 
since the first time I saw you. You rather set me 
on fire. You made me unsure of myself. You 
even hurt my work. I couldn’t soberly and sanely 
go near my own studio when you were there, be¬ 
cause I was afraid of myself—and of you.” 

“But you didn’t and don’t love me?” she ques¬ 
tioned him calmly. 

“No,” he admitted, “it wasn’t love. I didn’t want 
to marry you.” 

“Then what did you want?” 

“I wanted Beauty, but I didn’t quite know why 
or how!” 

There was an unusual calm in Brandt’s eyes, as 
if a storm had just passed. “And I had to be sat¬ 
isfied with getting it on canva9.” 

“And you?” repeated Tess, turning to Luther 
Swett, who sat frowning down at his cigar-ash. 


MANHANDLED 


305 


“My dear child,” replied that sofWoiced old rob¬ 
in. “I’ve had nothing but a fatherly interest in 
you. I've wanted to help you along, it’s true, but 
I did that because I saw you had talent.” 

“And how did I repay you for that help?” the 
luminous-eyed girl demanded. 

“By confronting me with one of the most ex¬ 
traordinary experiences I’ve had in a long and rather 
varied career,” he asserted with a rising annoyance. 
“And I think the sooner it's over the pleasanter it 
will be for everybody here.” 

“You are quite right,” agreed the girl, as her color 
went and came. “And you may regard it as over 
when I hand you back this key, the key of your 
studio which I came into without entirely under¬ 
standing the situation or the circumstances.” 

She flung the key on the table before him. But 
he neither touched it nor took it up. He merely 
sat with his head moving sorrowfully from side 
to side. 

“You’re entirely wrong in this, my dear,” he 
quietly protested. 

“I was entirely wrong,” she corrected with the 
care-free audacity of desperation. 

Her flaming eyes rested upon the debonair figure 
of Amo Ricard. “And you, Monsieur Ricard?” 
She hurled the question at him. “Was there ever 


MANHANDLED 


306 

anything in our relations that was not entirely and 
strictly business ?” 

“Certainly not,” answered the obese and slightly 
moist gown-king. He was man of the world enough 
to know when he was beaten, and he was anxious 
to be off. “I insisted that Mademoiselle McGuire 
allow me to loan her gowns, but that was only be¬ 
cause our peculiar business arrangement called for 
it. Our relations were always above reproach—a 
condition, I may add, that was entirely her own 
idea.” 

And then she turned to Jim, in whose blue eyes 
a great, glad light of understanding was dawning. 

“And you?” asked Tess, her voice quavering a 
little in spite of herself. 

“Unlike one or two others here,” he answered: 
slowly, and with a dignity quite new to him, “I do 
understand what this is all about. I’m only sorry 
I didn’t understand sooner. I’ve known you longer 
and better than any of the others here, and now, 
by God, I know you better than ever.” 

His face was pale but his jaw was resolute as 
he looked from her to her oddly-assorted guests. 
He spoke up again, slowly and distinctly. “And 
if you’re asking me, Tess, if I’ve ever made love to 
you, I’ll answer frankly that I’ve been doing it ever 
since I’ve known you.” 


MANHANDLED 


307 


There whs a stir about the table. But it was 
neither seen nor considered by the stalwart young 
country-bred man with the solemn eyes and the 
resolute jaw. 

"I’ve made love to you,” he pursued, “and, what’s 
more, I’m going to again. For I’ve learned some¬ 
thing here to-night that one or two of you fellows 
may have missed. I’ve found out that only the pure 
in heart are unafraid. It sounds preachy, but most 
of the big things in life are that, after all.” 

“What do you mean?” demanded Swett. 

“I mean that girl’s clean-hearted or she would 
never have faced you curs!” was Jim’s deliberated 
retort. 

“This,” observed the tired-faced Garretson, as he 
got up from the table, “looks more and more like 
our cue for a getaway.” 

The others rose also. As Bob Brandt said good- 
by, he held her hand a moment and said: “Don’t 
imagine we’re all going to die and go to hell for 
having liked you a little and wanted to pet you. 
They’re all too few like you in this town.” And, 
Jim standing by her side, momentarily regretted 
the last word that had fallen from his lips. Per¬ 
haps, in cooler blood, they wouldn’t stand as currish 
as he had claimed. 

When their reparting steps were still sounding 


MANHANDLED 


308 

down the hallway and the throaty rumble of Swett’s 
motor was starting outside, Jim turned to Tess. 
He turned and took her greedily in his arms. There, 
oddly passive, she lay with her tired lids drooping, 
and her lips met his. 

“You’re—you’re manhandling me,” she gasped, 
when she could get her breath. 

“After this,” he proclaimed as he gazed into her 
thin face, “that’s going to be my one end in life!” 

Then, just to prove that her womanly curiosity 
was still active, despite her strenuous day and night, 
Tess asked, “You didn’t really doubt me, did you, 
Jim?” 

“I’ve thought about that,” he admitted. “I 
didn’t really, I guess. If I had, I’d never have come 
here from the station.” 

“And you didn’t hesitate at all about coming 
back here to-night?” 

“You couldn’t have kept me away with a battalion 
of machine-guns!” he declared a trifle too* vehement¬ 
ly. He seized her again and kissed her anew quite 
thoroughly. This time she responded to that touch, 
responded with all her heart. 

“How soon will you marry me, Tess?” he abrupt¬ 
ly asked, finally letting her free. 

“Whenever you say,” she replied. Then she add¬ 
ed, after a little hesitation: “But I’d like it to be in 


MANHANDLED 


309 

Marysville, Jim, at Aunt Kit’s Methodist Church, 
with her giving me away. It might be more ro¬ 
mantic at the Little Church Around the Comer, 
but I don’t think it would ‘take’ so well. And I 
mean to have you for keeps.” She squeezed his 
two broad arms tightly. 

“Suits me,” he said, sighing deeply. 

“And afterward—where shall we live?” she 
asked, anxious, in spite of herself, though she 
wouldn’t have made an issue of it if he had said 
Timbuctoo. 

“It’ll have to be New York,” Jim responded, a 
grin suffusing his tired face. “You see, I’m to be 
sales-manager of the Detroit Accessories Company 
here when they get making the carburetor. That’ll 
be beginning about June the first. In addition to 
the royalties I get on the output, of course. You 
warned me not to be too modest in my price. And 
believe me, I wasn't." 

He pulled his contract from hi‘9 pocket and proud¬ 
ly showed it to her. 

“That’s wonderful, Jim!” she cried. “Why, 
we’re wealthy. And you won’t mind if I’m terribly 
modem and attend dramatic and art classes at Co¬ 
lumbia and all that? Provided, of course, I’m a 
good cook and manager besides?” 

He waved his hand expansively. 


3io 


MANHANDLED 


“That’s up to you,” he promised. “But when 
there’s batting around on Broadway to be done, 
you’ll do it with me?” 

“You bet!” she sighed, once more against his 
shoulder. 

They were married three days later, within the 
austere walnut-and-white exterior of the Marysville 
Methodist Church, and the Marysville Item the fol¬ 
lowing week carried this characteristic note of the 
wedding: 

Two former Marysvillians, Miss Theresa Mc¬ 
Guire, niece of our esteemed townswoman, Miss 
Katherine McNair, and James Hogan, son of the 
late Mrs. Mary Hogan, journeyed up from New 
York last Thursday and were married at the Meth¬ 
odist Church by the Reverend Philip Thurston. 
The wedding was attended only by immediate 
friends of the young couple. Mrs. Frederick Blake, 
of near Parksburg, was Miss McGuire’s only attend¬ 
ant, and Mr. Blake acted as best man. The bride- 
was given away by her aunt, Miss McNair. 

After a honeymoon motoring-trip through New 
England, the happy pair will return to New York, 
where they will reside and where Mr. Hogan will 
assume his duties as Eastern Sales Manager of the 
Detroit Accessories Company on June first. Mr. 
Hogan, probably Marysville High’s greatest athlete, 
is the sole inventor of the Hogan Economy Carbu¬ 
retor, which is beginning to create such a stir in 
motoring circles. Miss McGuire is the former 
teacher of the kindergarten grade at the Marysville 
School. 


MANHANDLED . 


3 ii 

The reporter, who secured his information 
at second-hand and from memory, could not have 
been expected to note for his readers the proud re¬ 
lieved look upon the thin face of Katherine McNair 
as she stepped back, gray-haired but straight as an 
arrow, after performing her little part in the cere¬ 
mony. Nor the sadly sweet thought that passed 
through her mind as she stood there watching the 
proud little back of Tess, ranged beside her sturdy 
sweetheart, recalling to the older woman a similar 
ceremony which she had attended twenty-two years 
before, after a hasty train-ride through the night 
and a similarly proud back she had fixed her eyes 
upon while a minister repeated the same familiar 
words. 

“She is her mother all over again,” something 
kept saying to Katherine McNair, and the mist in 
her eyes was partly caused by that memory. 

Nor did the Item's account carry anything about 
the merry but significant conversation between the 
newlyweds, as, having spent a quiet evening at home 
at Miss Katherine McNair’s, they piled their lug¬ 
gage the next morning into the car Jim had bought 
from his old employer, Frank Hammer, bade good- 
by to Aunt Kit, and breezed forth upon their honey¬ 
moon. 


312 


MANHANDLED 


"It seems like a good car,” remarked the bride, 
“even though it’s a second-hand.” 

“It is a good car,” Jim maintained, “good as 
new.” 

“Even though it’s been manhandled some,” she 
ventured. 

Their eyes met. Jim’s laugh was as clear as 
timber-line air. 

“It hasn’t been manhandled enough to hurt it,” 
he replied. “Its heart is O. K., honey, and that’s 
all that counts, provided it’s me who takes care of it 
from now on.” 


THE END 









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